I wouldn’t focus on calories. I’d focus on carbs. General guidance I believe is to consume about 90 grams /per hour. So if you’re eating a banana per hour for example that is not enough carbs.
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A formula will be nonsense anyway, it’s no more accurate than 220 - age for your max. Untrained LT1 can be really low, trained it can be very close to LT2.
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Bananas aren’t high carb and a banana that was 150cals would be a monster.
Sounds like you need to up your carbs.
For a two or three hour ride I’d probably be OK with only eating once an hour but for anything longer I’m eating every 20 minutes. 30 minutes max. By the time you’re feeling a but hungry at 60 minutes it’s already too late.
Do a forum search for carbs per hour to get an idea of what you’re doing. Like others have said don’t worry about calories more than carbs. With the carbs…come the calories.
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I can tell you in the first half my HR avg was 126bpm.
Second half… 145bpm.
Agreed. They say that because it’s what people want to hear and it’s not technically wrong. Maxing out on 1.5h rides is not going to optimize your performance in a 5+ hour ride/race. I know plenty of folks with big ftp’s and decent repeatability who fall off a cliff after a few hours. Yes, a high FTP is the tide that raises all ships, but I’ll take the ship with a 290FTP that does a 5+ hour ride each week over the ship with a 310w ftp that only does short rides/races (if I need to ride that ship in a long race). Again, I’m not saying you can’t do long events on short training sessions (and some people don’t have time to ride long). I’m just saying long training session help build endurance that allows watts to be pushed longer (as well as help train fueling, comfort, etc.).
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Me neither. Personally I think anyone doing a fondo style event who wants to finish strong, or at the very least not fade/limber across the finish line needs to be doing at least one 3-4 hour weekly ride.
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I disagree.
We’re all different. I’m not saying you’d be better off doing longer rides but I did Unbound with a pretty decent sub-13 time and didn’t ride longer than 2 hours for 8 months leading up to it.
I did one week with some long rides three weeks out. Finished strong. Felt “fine” at the end and felt fine the next day.
A bit of HR drift upwards but nothing serious.
We’d all fair better with a few longer rides but I wouldn’t say that “anyone” who wants to “finish strong” with a weekly 3 to 4 hour ride. I barely get one 3 or 4 ride most months.
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So many things.
- You’re doing great. And your pacing is excellent!
- It’s a 6.5 hour ride. Of course you’re gonna be cooked. We all would.
- Sounds like heart rate drift happened after 4.5 hours. Not bad at all!
- Definitely need more carbs. And carbs not calories. Forget fat and protein. You need straight carbs. I would add 60g of maltodextrin or straight table sugar to every bottle (you can build up to this but it’s a good start).
- Try and do one ride a week in the 3-4 hour range, only stop for traffic/water/nature breaks. Focus on HR drift. Keep both power and HR in Z2. Start your power at say 160w. Get a baseline HR. At whatever time it drifts take note and back down the power. Do this again on your next Z2 ride. See if you can extend time before drift. Keep this up till you can do 2-3 hours. Without drift. Raise power by 5w and start the process again.
We have the same ftp. I can hold 190w for four hours with no drift. You can too! And look how many calories I burned through in 4 hours.
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Fuel, water.
We only see your average for an hour which is meaningless, you need to be keeping your peaks well inside z2, and your uphills stretches too. Minimise your free wheeling to only when you spin out on descents.
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Really useful, thanks!
Fair question - made a conscious effort never to go above 190w. No freewheeling at any point.
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If that’s true, my LT1 is at like 50% FTP. That seems too low.
Have you got the full power graph?
What do you base this on?
The formula is not related to LT1 at all. But in general a smaller range means a smaller engine, so you need to rev the engine more to even go to a modérate pace.
The fact that most people’s aerobic base isn’t all that developed.
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How long have you been riding for? And what was your IF for Unbound?
A few things here:
- You need to train for long endurance rides. This isn’t something that you can do without training for it, you will have to work your way towards 6.5 hours.
- I find Seiler’s distinction between hard and easy rides useful in this context: it isn’t about intensity, but recovery. A hard ride is a ride that takes more than a day to recover from. You can do hard endurance rides, and they need to be sandwiched between easy rides.
- Some people will start a debate about polarized or TR’s approach to endurance workouts. I think you can ignore most of that for the present discussion. If you want to spend 5+ hours in the saddle, then you need to train for that specifically. Hence, you should add long endurance rides. Given the duration, I reckon they will be outdoors. Start with 3 hours and tack on 30 minutes every week if you felt well the week before and you could recover properly. Treat those as hard rides just like workouts with a lot of intensity. I’d do that independently of what you do the rest of the week. If you can manage 5 hours repeatedly, you could do double days on the weekend where you continue riding 5 hours on one day and extend the duration of the ride on the next. However, make sure that this investment makes sense. If you do two long rides per year, this might not be the best way to invest your time.
- Usually people are fine for 3–4 hours, and then they have to rely on exogenous carbs and fat. Nutrition and hydration becomes crucial, and on long rides it will be different than on shorter rides. If you don’t fuel with 80 g/h or more, your performance will decrease after the 3–4 hour mark, because most of your carb stores will have been emptied by that point. Put another way, most people can make do with their endogenous carbs for 3ish hours, so it doesn’t matter as much what they consume. But after that it is crucial, and if you haven’t ingested sufficient carbs (80ish g/h), you have dug yourself into a hole that you cannot dig yourself out of in time. That is complicated by the fact that you cannot pack 6 hours worth of carbs in your bottles or back pockets, and that you will likely require a proper meal on very long rides. Ditto for refilling your bottles. There is one climb I love to do, but unfortunately, there is no way to refill my bottles on the way. Hence, I will have to make sure I start this 1:20ish climb with two full bottles.
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I’ve been thinking about this all day today on my ride. I’m a massive cereal fan, I also do most of my fuelling off the bike. I do fuel my rides at a pretty high-rate when I’m working hard, or long.
I’m replying specifically because I know one of your main goals is body-composition. I really think that the big bowl of cereal just before bed is not great for body-composition. I caveat that with the fact that I do the exact same thing, I don’t have any body composition goals though.
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Yeah I did a 26hr ride on a LV plan last year and I’m not some physical specimen.
I’d done several double centuries previously and the difference maker was switching to 100% liquid carbs (there are lots of great threads around here with the malto/fructose/salt mix). It was wild — I would drink it and I could feel my legs and brain regain strength and focus when I was sooooo tired.
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This is mostly what I use. I can fit 3x 950ml bottles on my bike (SKS anywhere mount under downtube), 90g malto/fructose mix per bottle. I just drink one bottle per hour no counting needed. So up to 3 hours I don’t have to stop at all.
4-6 hour rides I just make one stop to fill bottles (I have ready measured 90g malto/fructose mix in plastic bags in my saddle bag). And on those longer rides I fill one bottle with water and eat something solid too like chocolate + some caffeine gels.
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