Can someone lend a bit of insight as to what kind of adjustments should be made for group rides?
A bit of context. I’m doing mid volume base 1 right now. During the weekdays, I dont do any additional riding, save perhaps some 20-30 minute noodles around the neighborhood.
On the weekends, in nice weather I sub out both rides for outdoor rides
Saturday: I replace the workout with a hard group ride. Typically 2.5-3hrs, a 55 mile flat loop with a short stop 2/3 of the way through. I make a point to go hard on this ride, pulling for quite a bit at sweet spot or threshold, with some harder efforts thrown in. TSS is pretty consistently right at 200 these days.
Sunday: Used to do the same thing as Saturday. Now I’m replacing the scheduled workout with 3-4 hrs of zone 2. Still a group ride, but I’m placing a hard cap of 200 watts, and am perfectly happy just dropping myself and either catching back on at regroup point, or meeting at the stop/end of ride.
Specific question is this…I’m not quite silly enough to do these group rides on top of the scheduled work…I am replacing those workouts, not adding on. However…would standard practice be to skip/replace one of the weekday rides as well due to the volume and intensity over the weekend?
Ok that makes sense. And those numbers are pretty spot on. I think 500tss a week is a fairly reasonable number for me. I’ve had issues spiking it to 700-800.
So going off of that, it seems pretty reasonable then that if I get both those ideal saturday and sunday rides in…that realistically would be about 350tss, which kind of jives with what I’ve been thinking, which is dial back/skip that following Tuesday depending on how hard I went over the weekend, to keep that 7 day tss number around 500 or unders (I’m really trying to err on the low side this year…).
dial back. Do an easy Tuesday. Keep riding. Keep trying to ride more. Slowly build up the capacity to do more work, to do 550TSS/week, to do 600TSS/week. You’ll have to make some intensity vs easy tradeoffs. “More” is better, but you might need to do “less” (more easy rides) to build up, if you catch my drift.
If I look at mid volume base you have 3 sweet spot, 1 threshold and 1 endurance. Your weekend rides are longer rides then what is scheduled. Your challenge is to assess what workouts to replace so that you can sustain what you are doing. Base 2 has a VO2, 2 threshold and a sweet spot. Not sure if you are just leaving the workouts as laid out by days and just dropping the Saturday Sunday workouts or if you move the workouts around based on what you are trying to progress in.
The debate as you indicate is to drop/replace one of the rides. I used to do MV but found it was easier to maintain doing low volume and doing the 2 hard workouts and adding like you a 2-3 hours Z2 on Friday and then a 3-4 hour group ride on Sunday. I just vary how much effort I do on the group ride and can still add another workout but it will be an easier ride. I couldnt sustain the mid volume. I likely was doing 3 harder rides at that point plus my outside workouts. I would still in the summer get to 8-10 hours in the week of riding.
It really is the challenge of how fresh you feel before your challenging workouts. I am in my 60s so sticking to just 2 challenging workouts of TR makes it manageable for me.
I havent been moving anything around…I’ve been subbing the saturday and sunday TR workouts out, then doing tue, wed, thurs as scheduled.
Realistically, the ONLY difference I would see between mid or low volume in this case is the wed easy ride…which I’m not too concerned about.
I think my initial thought is fairly solid…if I have a big weekend…scale down to pettit or skip that tuesday sweet spot ride depending on what I feel like doing that morning.
