The Ultimate Ride: Get Fit, Get Fast, and Start Winning with the World's Top Cycling Coach

by Chris Carmichael, Jim Rutberg

Lance Armstrong's personal coach shares the Tour de France champion's training regime, cutting-edge techniques, nutritional advice, goal-setting practices, and mental exercises, in a step-by-step program for aspiring cyclists. 60,000 first printing.

Genres: Cycling, Sports, Fitness

336 pages, Hardcover

First published June 23, 2003

About the author

Chris Carmichael is a retired professional cyclist and cycling, triathlon and endurance sports coach. He was a member of the 1984 U.S. Olympic Cycling Team, the 7-Eleven Professional Cycling Team (1985–1987), and the Schwinn-Wheaties professional cycling team (1988–1989). He started coaching with the United States Cycling Federation (now USA Cycling) in 1990, was the U.S. Men's Road Cycling team coach for the 1992 Olympic Games and the U.S. Olympic Cycling Team Head Coach for the 1996 Olympic Games.

Reviews

[Nickel]

The first time I read this book, I found it incredibly distracting that every single workout had a [TM] after it. Over and over again, [TM]'d seemingly silly things. It made me skim through the book and not really read it.

I recently re-read it and found it last distracting as I was prepared for the onslaught of [TM]s and could ignore them. The workouts are incredibly similar to the ones suggested in the Friel book. I think the nice points are detailed information about bike fitting and potential issues that could be the source of knee/hip/back pain.

[Mike]

I enjoyed the first half of this book. But as you moved through the book, the techniques become overly complicated and less interesting. The only people that I could see benefiting are professional riders riding 20 or more hours a week.

[David]

2.4/5 CC trained Lance. There is a lot of that. CC is a coach. CC thinks you NEED. A coach. There is a lot of that. A lot of information here. Some real basic. Pretty thorough book on competitive cycling.

[Jason]

Mildly informative, but it's more or less just a marketing engine for CTS and another means for which Chris Charmichael can remind us that, yes, he does indeed know Lance Armstrong. ...big fucking deal.

[Rick]

If you are looking to do some serious road biking, this is your book - Both for motivation and actual training techniques.

[Victoria]

Learned a few things, but it wasn't s engaging as I hoped it would be.

[Sarah]

siricat gave me this book on a list of good books to read