The Driftless Dagger & Block Training
How does one of my 2025 goals fit in with updates to my training plans?
Back at the start of the year when I published my list of goals for 2025, there was one intentionally mysterious item:
Well, it’s mysterious no more! The Driftless Dagger has been officially announced. The grand depart is on September 20, with the course running along both sides of the Mississippi River while passing through Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
The course’s tagline is “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” so maybe suitably its 880km includes more than 11k vertical meters with an elevation profile looks like a sawblade.
I’ve ridden parts of this area before, including a solo bikepacking trip in 2021 and the Ten Thousand Ride in 2022 and 2023. The hills are absolutely no joke. While no single one of them is all that tall, they can be steep, loose, and relentless when stacked one after another after another.
It’s another race on my calendar for the year, and one I will be taking seriously. That said, it’s not an “A” race for me. In fact, it’s just two weeks before the Arkansas High Country Race. So what am I doing taking on another major challenge so soon before one of my primary goals?
Playing with Block Periodization
There are a number of training practices which, as an amateur cyclist with a full schedule of work, family, friends, and other everyday responsibilities, I can’t realistically take advantage of. Gravel racing pros, for example, are doing larger volume blocks than ever. But I don’t have 30 hours I can realistically commit to training in a week. Perfectly planning my gym sessions and interval sessions across a week isn’t possible when significant parts of my schedule are governed by the days I need to be in my office rather than working from home.
That’s why I’ll make a training schedule to ensure I’m doing the things I need to over the span of a given week, but will be flexible about which days I’m actually performing those workouts. As I write this, just last night I did an interval session on what was supposed to be a rest day because I needed to free up the night that session was originally scheduled.
I don’t imagine that changing for me this year. Still, I’m hoping to experiment a bit with block periodization.
In short, block periodization means that rather than having a consistent training schedule week in and week out, you stack a large number of either high intensity or high volume sessions into a 2-3 week “block,” followed by a rest week with a much lower volume of easy riding. There is evidence (as outlined in the video above, among others) that this can prompt greater fitness adaptations in your body than a relatively constant level of training, provided that it does not lead to overtraining and exhaustion.
If you do this, the goal is to push yourself hard, then allow time to recover. Fitness gains are typically on about a two-week lag from workouts anyways, so this provides time for the training to “work” before you enter the next block.
What Does This Have To Do with the Driftless Dagger?
Although it’s pushing the limits a little bit, one way that I can look at the Driftless Dagger is as “my final bit of really high intensity training before the Arkansas High Country Race.” This is especially true because the two races are so similar: repeated short-to-medium length climbs on steep ramps, over and over and over again. Recovering from the Driftless Dagger will take a bit of time, but at under 900k, it shouldn’t be quite as physiologically (and emotionally) draining as a 4+ day race like the Mishigami Challenge or the Arkansas High Country Race.
The hope, then, is that recovery from Driftless Dagger will merge right into my AHCR taper - a two week period where I ride some to keep the legs fresh, but take it pretty easy to be fresh for the AHCR start.
I haven’t made any sort of detailed training plans for September yet, but I anticipate carrying a fairly meaningful training load into the start of the Driftless Dagger so that it constitutes the end of a heavy training block. I’ll do a short taper into Driftless Dagger to make sure that I’m not showing up to the start line of an ultra race completely shelled, but the general idea is that it’s training as much as a race.
Taking a step further back, I know already that I’m going to need to plan carefully for the post-Mishigami time period, as not only has this been a place where I’ve struggled in the past, but the span from the end of the Mishigami to the start of the Driftless Dagger is going to go quickly. In broad strokes, I plan to take a couple weeks completely off post-Mishigami, but then transition into a 6-8 week training ramp that culminates in the Driftless Dagger.
Of course, Driftless Dagger and Arkansas High Country Race are the last big events on my 2025 calendar, not the first. I won’t have to wait until September to test these ideas and - MOST importantly - my ability to effectively recover from a heavy training block.
Working back towards the present, I have two options for a training block capstone pre-Mishigami, both of which also come two weeks before race start: Chicago Randonneurs’ Spotted Cow in a Barrel 600k or the even more ambitious Driftless Randonneurs’ Tour of the Driftless. At the moment I’m leaning towards the former both because it’s my home club and because the Tour of the Driftless would necessitate a day off of work I don’t really want to take given the time off I’ll already be taking for my “A” races.
Working back a final time, one of my first chances to accomplish another big goal for the year, a straight-shot 600k, will come in May. If I similarly treat this as the end of a training block (or perhaps the middle of one, given that Chi Rando’s Aurora City of Lights 400k will come a week later at the end of the month), that makes my primary season a succession of three key periodized training blocks: the 600k block, the pre-Mishigami block, and the Pre-AHCR block. It will also give me some important data about my own ability to recover from a major training block before I reach my first major, multi-day race.
Of course, there’s also the training from now up to that May 600k ride, and that’s not to be overlooked. I’m still firmly in offseason base training right now given how backloaded my year is, but I’ll be writing soon about how I intend to leverage that initial springtime ramp from offseason base training to race-ready performance.
I also want to benefit from the wisdom of any of you who may have tried block periodization before. Did you see the benefits you’d hoped to? How did it fit with your off-bike schedule? Were you able to recover after a significant training block? Share your experiences in the comments!
Lastly, go register for the Mishigami Challenge and the Driftless Dagger yourself! Bikepacking races are great even if you’re a purely recreational cyclist because of how much they can teach you about yourself and your resilience. If you’re still looking for goals for the year, these (or their half-distance little siblings) are great ones to shoot for!