I finished top 3 in a 104 mile 5500 ft climb event. Never rode the trainer for more than 2 hrs and did three rides of 3 hours outside. Conserve energy… I had plenty of legs at the end because I was smart early.
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Playing Devil’s Advocate here:
Could you have won if you’d done more long rides as part of your training?
Mike
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The original question was can it be done and the answer is sure. Can it be done other ways sure also. There is more than one way to skin a cat.
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By the end, it was a three man break as we’d whittled the field away. I just can’t sprint. 
I don’t think it had much to do with my legs.
I’m all for training specificity. If you’re regularly racing five hour events, then two hour trainer sessions probably need to be augmented with longer rides. But if it’s an infrequent thing to race those kinds of events, it can definitely be done IMO on the TR plans.
Yeah. I agree with you.
Mike
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I do, but easy to get out of town; but even in Nashville it wasn’t bad
Best to do the structured workout first then add on volume.
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totally depends on your level of riding; if you can do them later that is much more beneficial
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Can you expand on that? All the TR advice (coach Chad) says to add volume after the structured work, which makes the most sense to me. If I have a hard work out I need to knock out I’d much rather do that first. I could see a psychological benefit of doing the workout after maybe? Thanks!
It is like fatigue resistance training, burn through some kJs, then put in the efforts towards the end (like a Road Race.)
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That’s the caveat — it’s got to be a substantial enough amount of kJ to induce a difference. Adding an extra 20min of Z2 at the start won’t cut it, better to do those shortish add-ons at the end of an interval sesh.
We were talking 90 minutes+ (not 20) ^^^^
Yes, understood, but the OP was not:
Even 30 mins pre-interval work is more like an extended warmup, unless perhaps it’s low cadence-high torque work. Thus, doing the 30min Z2 post-interval work would probably be more beneficial.
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Well there’s your issue.
I don’t think the issue is the TrainerRoad plans. In my opinion the issue is you’re only hanging with those guys because they are NOT riding at 1.0 IF for the first 90 minutes of a 180 minute race. It’s likely those guy are chugging along closer to .8 IF, meanwhile you’re killing yourself just to keep up.
It shouldn’t really matter how strong you are, the way the IF calculation works, if you somehow manage to hold 1.0 IF for around 60 minutes at the beginning of a ride, it stands to reason that you should explode spectacularly at some point in the near future.
Anecdotally, I do the low-volume TR plans and find this allows me to ride many many hours at a high level as long as I’m realistic about my pacing strategy.
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they nailed that on the head below. doing them later is a more advanced move of getting 1,500 (cat 3) - 3,000 (p/1) kj in the legs THEN doing intervals.
get the quality work done then enjoy the remainder as they lay out. you’ll make gains from consistency
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Missed it before, but if IF was in the neighborhood of 1.0 at 90min, it’s no wonder you exploded and got dropped. You simply have to get fitter and raise your threshold or ride much, much more efficiently. That can be done with 60, 90, 2hr workouts. Higher threshold will make those efforts to keep up relatively easier.
To wit, in my 5 hour race, I had an overall IF of 0.77 and spent more than 2 hours of that time coasting or in zone 1, and almost another hour of that pedaling in zone 2 below 75%. That looks a lot more like an intense 2 hour trainer session when you can lop off almost half of it not pedaling at all or soft pedaling and another hour of it just kind of noodling along. I couldn’t survive that same pace if I’d stayed on the front the whole time, but I sat in as much as I could, used the rollers to allow gaps to open and then closed them on descents, and let everyone else chase things down while I stayed on wheels. When the time came to start doing work in the second half of the race, I was plenty fresh, and I just kept my pulls manageble, peeling off before I thought I really needed to. I had done a very hard metric century earlier in the year where I (for some reason) felt the need to show how strong I was early, and I paid for it later… I learned a valuable lesson that day… I let everyone else show off early on, and I keep the legs to show off late.
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I don’t know the science, but I’ve personally found that I need to do long rides to be really strong at the end of long events. When I’m not doing long rides, I can still push my FTP to a high level and I can be strong at the end of a 2 hour event. If I’m doing a 4-6 hour saturday ride a least a couple times a month, I might have the same FTP and I won’t be any stronger at the end of a 2 hour event, but it’s a game changer for me when I get into long events. This is especially true in gravel races or marathon MTB where you are never spinning easy in a pack.
I recently read an article about Will Barta’s progression to become a world tour rider and they talk about “Tired20” power and I think it’s a really important number for certain types of racing. Basicallly, it’s your 20 minute power after you’ve already done ~3000kj of work. If I’m not doing long rides, I can’t do any intensity 3000kj into an endurance/tempo pace ride. If I’m doing long rides on a regular basis, I can ramp it up into SS or even threshold when I’m 5 hours into a ride.
I don’t know how much of this is just mental conditioning to ride frequently for these durations vs. the physical adaptations, but it feels very real for me mentally and physically. A lot of it is just being comfortable being on the bike that long.
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Thanks to everyone who has replied, I am really learning a lot from your comments. I did another 106km race this morning. I didn’t try to stay with the racing snakes this time, had a nice chilled ride with the slower group, only to be dropped at about 90km. IF for the whole race was .92 and the average HR was 85% of the max HR, it felt much more tolerable than the 1.0 IF race with a 90% Av HR.
Just wondering what is the IF and their average HR of those who win races or get in the top 3?
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Bit of a different take on this, I think that if you do only TR workouts indoors, you might lose the ability to self-pace or get a feeling for “how hard is too hard” when riding outdoors. TR workouts are obviously designed so that you can complete them (bad days apart), so you can just go as hard as needed (ie as the interval says) without too much fear of not being able to finish. There’s no such gurantee in a race (in fact, everyone else will try their best to ensure you can’t stick with it), so you rely on a bit of experience to feel if you can stay with a group or not.
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Everyone is different. For Steamboat Gravel my average heart rate was 167 for 5 hours and 15 minutes. Max was 186. Which is a far cry from where it is during a crit, cx, or even a shorter mtb or road race. My max is somewhere around 205 and my latest lactate threshold for HR was 187.
I never tried to get into the red for me. I dug a lil deep in the first 30 miles to stay with the lead group. This was my first gravel race and really first race where we weren’t racing in categories - either USAC or non sanctioned mtb style.
Are you racing something like that or in categories where everyone should be close to the same level?
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