To be an effective and successful ‘cross racer you need to be a good planner. ‘Cross is slightly more complicated than other disciplines; you need more bikes, more wheels, you need to figure out which tyres you need on all those wheel combinations, you need more shoes, more gear, more help in the pits... it all adds up. If you simply rock up to a race or even go into the season without a plan you will be on the back foot for the entire hour, or worse, the whole season.
 
Planning and organisation go hand in hand. Being organised means you never forget anything in your kitbag, always have the “just in case” items ready for those extremes of weather that will leap out and bite you from time to time each season; being organised means bags for muddy shoes and clothes, wheel bags to save your car seats, spare pins for numbers and spikes for shoes, gels on hand for pre-race and recovery drink made before you leave home for the race. That’s organisation and it’s important day to day, but planning makes the difference between a good season and a forgettable one that simply fades into a blur with all the others.
Too many riders train hard in the summer and go into September fit and rarin’ to go, race once or twice a weekend for a few weeks with great results, but as the season draws on they gradually slip down the field and out of contention. The difference between this happening or keeping it going and becoming even better as the winter draws on is not down to training harder or differently, it’s simply about planning.
Start with your goals. Whatever your level of ambition or experience, you need goal setting as the primary and fundamental underpinning of your season plan. Without goals there is no focus. In a typical season that starts in  September and ends in most of the US after Nationals in December, you have around 14 weekends of racing; too long to hang onto top form for the whole period, but too short to take a mid-season break and rebuild. This might be more practical in a Euro season that continues through to early February and I’m sure you’ve read about some of the northern Europeans who take advantage of the Igorre World Cup in Spain to escape to the sun on one of the Spanish islands either before or after this event for a return to conditioning training in warmer weather that will see their form hold through the rest of the season.
 
Goals ideally need to be specific to events, therefore performance goals. Becoming technically better in sand, not fading in the last lap of a race, or learning a different bike carrying technique, these are process goals which ultimately help in the quest to achieve the more important performance goals and should not be ignored; more of those later.
Also try to avoid using a series classification as a performance goal. A target of a four weekend series spread over a twelve week season is likely to be more successfully achieved if one or two of the rounds are specifically targeted, and your overall fitness and condition, which have been sufficiently improved in the off-season, should see you through the other rounds.
 
So with two or a maximum of three performance goals highlighted on your season planner, work backwards; give yourself a full taper to ensure you are totally fresh for your goal which would normally be around five days, then prior to that an intensive training black of 2-3 weeks that might compromise the results in other races you take part in. Before that a recovery period to ensure you are relatively fresh for this block of training. Break your season down into chunks of hard training, recovery or maintenance training, rest and goals, and suddenly on paper in black and white it becomes very obvious if what you have dreamt about is feasible!
 
Your process goals can be anything that you think will help you improve your performance; simply by identifying, listing and working these into your training sessions, you will automatically improve them simply because you identified they were a weakness. As mentioned before they could be skill or fitness based, or something simple like trying to arrive at races with more time to spare, or cleaning your bike straight after a race.
 
Planning; some people thrive on lists and making plans, some people see it as an inconvenience that eats into valuable training time, but guaranteed some planning done now, just a few weeks before your season gets underway will make you a better racer!
 
Simon.