Best Specialty For Gravel Rides

Training
1

Hey All,

I’m currently coming out of my build phase and I have a couple decent sized gravel rides coming up. Both are between 40-60 miles with 4500-5500 ft elevation, and about 70-80% gravel to road. I’m not too interested in racing, so I was thinking the Century specialty might be the best bet for finding a good pace and sustaining it for a few hours. Alternatively I was curious if maybe the 40k TT plan might be better for continuing to elevate my FTP with the more aggressive workouts and that would translate to better sustained power in a longer ride. What do you guys think?

2

Century is what you want. 40k TT can work, and won’t be a problem.

You could pick the one that looks more fun or more like how you plan to do the ride.

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Thanks!

That was my current strategy, just needed a sanity check to make sure I wasn’t subconsciously picking the lesser high-intensity plan to be a wus. :grinning:

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Check out this blog post about what to use to train for long gravel races:

Our very own @Bryce put together this resource for you as well, I think you’ll find it useful:

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FYI, I and others have made the wrong assumption that the Century Specialty is “easy”. We found that it is anything but that.

In fact, I think many people (myself included) actually find the longer duration intervals to be more difficult (in their special way) when compared to more spiked and irregular Specialty programs.

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6

FYI, I and others have made the wrong assumption that the Century Specialty is “easy”. We found that it is anything but that.

Totally, I don’t expect it to be easy at all, I just tend to be able to endure long sweet-spot/threshold work-outs better than I do hard-hitting VO2 max and anaerobic efforts.

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Thanks a ton, that’s very helpful info.

1 Like