After first waking up stay as calm as possible. Relieve yourself if necessary (this will drop your pulse a few beats) then go back to bed and pretend to fall asleep. With a watch or clock in sight count your pulse for a full minute. Don't think about all you want to do today, just try to get your pulse as low as possible by thinking calming thoughts. The other method is to strap on your heart rate monitor and under the same conditions record the lowest number.

The more fit you are the lower your morning pulse should be relative to what it was when you first started checking it. My morning pulse will increase about 10 beats if I have a cold, injury, or train hard. If it stays high for more than a couple of days I know I had better take it easy until it gets back to normal.

• Training Diary
  I record my morning pulse, weight (in the morning), amount of sleep, how long I spend training (actual riding time), average heart rate etc. While writing this section I thought I should check to see what I did a few weeks before I did well at an AMBC event in 1998. I was excited to see that long rides once a week over difficult terrain mixed in with easy days of training seem to work for me. I used a four week training cycle riding 8hrs, 11hrs, 16hrs, and 9hrs respectively prior to the race. If you have a record of what you have done in the past you will then be able to learn what is best for your current goals.

• Heart Rate Monitor
  Read the training books on this subject. I find that it is hard to know just by feel how much energy you are expending at times. When you know your maximum heart rate the percentages of that figure are an excellent indicator of your intensity of effort. Some racers consider heart rate monitors an unnecessary distraction and go by feel alone, but I think a heart rate monitor is a great tool to gauge improvement and measure training intensity. I like to see how low I can keep my heart rate while climbing tough hills.