As title says looking for plan to use for an event on March 8th 2020, 235km / 4500 m climbing. Targeting sub 9’hours. Have 15000km in legs preceding 12 months. I ride mostly fairly flat fast bunch 80km rides & Crits. Cat 3 Masters rider . 345 FTP / 82KG. What plans would be recommended ? I thought cut base stage given timing, do build at either Sustained Power Build or Century, both on high volume 10 hour type plans.
Cheers for your input in advance!
If you already have a strong base, do sustained power build.
Would you recommend this over the specialty century?
Build does what is says, builds fitness. Specialty is just fine tuning race demands and not necessarily lifting your fitness. Ideally you’d do Base, Build then Specialty for a full 28 weeks or just Build and Specialty if you already have a good Base. So ensure you have cake baked and layered with frosting before you consider what sprinkles you want . With just 8 weeks out you have time to raise your FTP before you taper into the event.
Interestingly plan builder reckons you should do SSB 1 and as much of SSB 2 (and give yourself a recovery week) as possible.
Assumes mid volume plan and picked the “intermediate” option.
Plan builder assumes you have no Base and you are starting fresh from an offseason or break in structured training. Plan builder at this time does not look at previous work, so you could be approaching a peak in fitness and it would still recommend SSB1.
Good point. In this instance I can make it skip base by picking the expert option. Then it looks like this:
That’s high. What are your weaknesses?
In a near 9-hour event, you’re going to be riding tempo and below the entire time, so you have two choices to prepare for it: try to raise your FTP, or maximize TTE near FTP. I think the latter is the better choice, considering your crit background and that you only have 8 weeks.
I’d be inclined to doing some sort of extended version of Sweet Spot Base 2 High Volume and working on a really good fueling strategy.
What’s your crit schedule for this year?
If that is the event i thinks it is (Peaks Challenge), then i would just jump on board with the remaining portion of the Intermediate plan written by Dr Stephen Lane specifically for the event
Got under 9hrs last year using it.
If i was using TrainerRoad for the same with only 8 weeks to go, i would also run with SSBHV and try and stretch out TTE for the 90 minute climbs
@PotsieA
Indeed it is Peaks Challenge -Falls Creek , Australia, thanks for the tip-off on the training program. Will look it up : https://s23705.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2020-PCFC-Training-Guides-Inter-v4.pdf
@QuittingBikes
My fIrst season racing so lots of learnings - cat 3 = open c /b grade in Australia. Crits - Weakness - positioning last few laps, burning too many matches , sprint finish and finding at least two others to get in a breakaway with ! Crits once per week for next 16 weeks. SSBHV 2 looks good and agree 90 m TTE on a trainer would be good mentally. May raise the front wheel slightly as well in lieu of hills.
Kids mean difficult to get in too many IRL rides.
@brenph
Thanks for the plan will look it over, new to TP so very helpful
@MI-XC @Gary_Gumnut thanks for advice
I was watching this with interest. I’m also doing peaks challenge.
Falls creek is currently evacuated due to the bushfires.
Another thought if you are not local - i had no ability to ride any of the course prior to the race (live in NZ), so the other thing i did was to extract GPX files of the major climbs from Strava and “rode” them on Tacx’s Desktop App a number of times. There were no surprises on the day!
Wishes are with those in all fire affected areas, hoping for some rain to get the fronts under control.
Once lives and property are safe, will be keen to see if there’s any impacts on the event. I’ve been training for it diligently, but that is insignificant relative to the concern for the wellbeing of those in the area. Fingers crossed!