Im going to be joing my first cycling team?

You are joining a cycling club not a team there is a big difference. Will you be riding a mountain bike with the group that is on road bikes ? If you are you will have a very hard time trying to keep up. Some clubs have mountain bike rides also.

You really should be training every day. If it's raining or bad weather, deal with it or set the trainer up inside.

It's the perfect time to get started; you can train this season (it just started) and then next season you'll be in top condition to race.

Group rides are essential for riding with a team. You'll learn how your teammates ride and what your best role on the team will be. You also just develop a good relationship with them. My roadie buddy usually rides solo during the week and then with the team on the weekends. With Daylight Savings coming up, there will be time to get in two or three group rides a week, in addition to weekend rides.

You won't be able to keep up with the team if you're on a mountain bike. If it's a mountain biking team, that's great. But they still do primarily road riding as training, so you'll need a road bike if you want to ride with them most of the time.

Training is different now from the way it was when i first started racing ('83-84). Back then I just went out on the team rides and after warming up and the group split up, I just went with the Cat 2/3's, since they would do the hardest rides. At first I'd get dropped every time the hammer went down, but as time went on and I didn't quit, I got stronger and could stay in with them until the end. Racing results didn't always follow how well I did in training because racing was always harder and less predictable than training. Over time I learned that a more systematic approach worked better for reaching and maintaining good form--I went from going on the group rides every day to doing more structured workouts with a heart rate monitor, sometimes with one or two other like-minded riders, or on my own. Once I started doing that, I went from almost "winning" the training rides, but only finishing top 20 in races, to finishing top 5 more often and actually winning some big events. Group rides are always fun, they make it easier to stay motivated, they build camaraderie within the team, and they teach you how to ride closely, smoothly and safely in a group, but you don't want to do group rides exclusively for your training--it's often too easy to just do what the "big dogs" on the team do, and not pay attention to what will work best for you personally--that takes time and experience to figure out. More experienced riders will do at least 2 or 3 group rides a week, supplemented with motor pacing as spring develops, but in my experience, interval training, hill training, time trial workouts are best done on my own with a good heart monitor, a speedometer, and a timer. It's now early March, and early season races have already started, depending on what district you're in. At this point, you should already have a decent mileage base in your legs--1-2000 miles, and you should be riding every day, tapering off weight training, and should be thinking about starting interval (i.e. anaerobic threshold) training. At this point, my interval training is usually restricted to the early season races on weekends, although being older, I don't race as often as I used to, so what I do now is not likely to be relevant for you.

My first race? A 20 mile criterium as a Cat 4 in Sacramento. Was an oval, half-mile course, not very technical, so not well suited for breakaways, rode conservatively (after race analysis was that we rode too conservatively, should have tried something, but at the time we were too chicken). I managed to stay near the front for the whole race, only to crash in the final 100 meters when some guys right in front of me pressed together and went down--at top speed it happened faster than I'd ever thought possible, and there was nowhere to go but right into them, so down I went too. Broke my glasses, dinged my right shoulder, but was back on the bike next day.

If all you have is a mountain bike, then right now, that's the kind of racing you'll be able to do. Here's a killer mtn bike training session that you can do inside early in the season--it's about an hour and will leave your legs feeling like quivering pieces of jello, and it can also help out if you're a road rider:

1. 10-15 min warmup

2. medium-high gear full-on sprint (leg speed should be at least 100 rpm) for 30 sec, then 30 sec recovery, repeat about 10 times.

3. 5 minute recovery

4. medium-high gear about 85-95% effort for 2 min, then 2 min recovery, repeat 5-10 times, depending on how frisky you're feeling. By the end I can pretty much guarantee you won't be feeling very frisky

5. throw up if you need to

6. 10-15 min warmdown. By now you will have perfected your own thousand-yard stare.

Good luck, and remember, whenever you're feeling like s***, and you can't go on, "we do this 'cause it's fun."