This is a solid strategy. You can fit more carbs into the bottles, but at one point the sweetness is overpowering.
Any ride over 3ish hours requires at least one pit stop where you refill your bottles and eat something. Yes, you could pack your pockets full of gel and all, but I find that quite expensive and after 5 hours or so, I yearn for proper food. Here in Japan most routes are littered with convenience stores. Depending on where you ride, you might do that at a nice café or lunch place.
Thanks, good to hear.
I’m doing a second attempt at a 200 mile ride. Last year I stuck strictly to indoor workouts, mostly due to time constraints. I got to the halfway point and withdrew, I was really fading. Quite possibly due to nutrition, although I was doing the drinks mix thing. Probably more due to not used to working for that long.
This year I’m trying to stick to the plan but I want to incorporate longer rides so I’ve got a chance to adapt. Difficult to fit in some of the TR efforts knowing that I need to ‘save’ some energy for a long ride the next day.
Hopefully it goes better this year!
The easiest solution is to ride more, mostly easy and sometimes hard. Too much nuance discussed to really address the fact that 4-5 hours a week has lots of room to grow by simply riding more.
FWIW I’ve done a few 200+ mile rides off the back of doing training rides in the 70-100 mile range. I’d say stepping up from 100 to 200 miles isn’t really about more aerobic fitness, it’s more about physical resilience. By which I mean the ability to spend that long in the saddle without developing debilitative levels of lower back pain, knee pain, saddle sores, neck pain, etc. And then on the day of course pacing and nutrition are absolutely key.
I consider myself ready to do a 200 mile ride if I’m able to do a genuinely easy 100 mile ride. I.e. one where by nailing pacing and nutrition I’m finishing 100 miles feeling pretty good, no bad aches and pains, and the thought of riding another 100 miles isn’t overly daunting. I can normally get to this state with a combination of a TR LV plan to provide the intensity, regular long rides building up to ~100 miles, and strength training. I think the strength training really helps with the resilience aspect, I get far fewer aches and pains on the bike when I’m doing a good regular strength routine.
Oof that’s a significant aerobic decoupling. I was thinking you’d post a change of less than 10 bpm for the power drop. You’ve just got to develop that aerobic base. Get the volume in at low intensity. It will also make you metabolically more flexible, not just dependent on a sugar burning engine for distance.
There’s the discussion which I’m sure you’ve seen of are you better off doing the single long Z2 ride of 6 hours or doing a 3 hour, 2 hour, and 1 hour ride?
I think the thinking has changed and the belief is that if the volume is the same, the results are pretty similar. If you do the single big ride, you get a bigger stimulus but it has a decay curve with a half life. Doing the shorter rides, they each give a smaller stimulus, but because you’re getting that stimulus more frequently at three times a week instead of once, you get a similar return.
Personally I like to push out the longer ride as you are also gaining or relearning about what nutrition and hydration you need for the duration to remain in good shape. But I also do a couple of shorter Z2 in week, sometimes up to four Z2 sessions in a week depending on what intensity I’m doing that week, and whether I’m progressing volume or intensity or a hybrid mix.
Everyone will have a Z2 duration where they don’t need to eat anything (solid or liquid) without much decoupling or loss of performance. For some that may be an hour, for others it may be three or four hours if they’ve really developed their aerobic engine. If you only do the shorter rides you may only learn what nutrition works for you at those durations, push out the duration and you’ll find what does or does not scale.
But back to volume, if you can’t do the longer duration rides (at least very often), then try and get that volume via multiple rides where you can fit them in. I ride ultra endurance the ones that may extend past 100 hours of riding. I rarely go above 6-7 hours as my longest rides outside of events. But I do get the volume in by perhaps as well as the 6-7 hour ride , doing a 3-4 hour ride the next day. Plus I get the volume in year round though it grows as I head towards my longer events.
My 10 hour pace is my 100 hour pace. How about that?
In the context of attempting a 200 mile ride, I think you absolutely need to do some rides at least in the 100 mile range. As I said above, I think that the aerobic fitness required to do 200 miles isn’t dissimilar to that required for 100 miles. Doing those long training rides isn’t so much about the aerobic training stimulus, it’s about building fatigue resistance and identifying and addressing the pacing/nutrition/comfort/muscle/joint issues that are likely to derail the big day.
If it’s just about the optimal approach to building fitness with limited weekly volume, then I fully agree that doing multiple 1-3 hour rides is better than blowing most or all of your weekly training “budget” on a single 6 hour ride.
I actually wouldn’t worry too much about saving energy. I think starting a long ride with a bit of fatigue from a hard interval session the day before is quite a good way of building the fatigue resistance you need for a really long ride which you can’t realistically get close to in a single training session. Back to back longish rides is another good approach.
FTP is one metric that determines performance. There are many others beyond FTP that are independent of FTP. Fatigue resistance is another one.
“Zone 2” defined as a percentage of FTP works up until fatigue starts to kick in. Depending on your experience/training history, this could be after 12 hours, or after only 60 minutes.
After that, continued performance is more strongly impacted by fatigue resistance. Zone 2 is only “all-day” pace, if you have highly trained fatigue resistance. Most recreational/amateur cyclists are not going to be able to ride z2 all day. The phrase is a malapropism. Otherwise riding 400km rides would be no big deal.
Carbs definitely help. They reduce RPE. And anecdotally, eating more carbs also seems to reduce the “fatigue” signal you get.
BUT this isn’t enough. Otherwise everyone and their dog could just eat 90+ g/h of carbs and then ride 400km with no problems.
The more important factor in my mind is developing fatigue resistance. And you do this by increasing the volume of your riding per week, and by doing more regular long rides.
Agree 100%, but where is the easy answer that everyone wants to hear?
Lol. Yes, often these discussions turn into:
Thanks - v useful. Not looking for shortcuts just solid advice, which I’ve had plenty of here - appreciated!
My main focus is randonneuring, where a typical day is going to be 200+ miles. You’re 100% right from my experience – if you have the fitness to ride at a steady pace for 100 miles, you can do it for 200 (and more). Pushing to and then past the 200 mark was more about dealing with that other stuff you mentioned. It’s miserable to be perfectly fine from a cardio-vascular standpoint, but have elbow/toe/bottom pain that prevents you from putting out even Z2 type power. And so many of those physical issues only mattered post 100 miles.
The only thing I’ll add to your list is the mental battle – this is also something that’s pretty much impossible to train without extending length of session.
The big takeaway for myself from this training efforts in the past is that 2-3 hour rides are fine for developing the aerobic base, but occasional longer efforts are key. And they are especially useful under the fatigue of back-to-back days with intensity, since it’s a good way to simulate the fatigue of an even longer day.
Thanks.
I had misread the OP thought you had said four hours, but this is pretty good for 6.5 even with the breaks. It doesn’t look to me like you were struggling with fuel - you’d see a different pattern imo.
Fuelling and hydration will always help so definitely do that well. But. Holding 155 or 165 averages will be a combination of factors; your technique with hills (previously discussed), the route, your riding partners, your endurance.
The route and partners is hard to affect so I would take some of the longer indoor rides and see how holding the higher averages feels.
Check out your Endurance score, I suspect you’d be fine with Virginia 4.5 1h45 0.66IF right now
Then look at working your way up the levels to Big Mountain 7, Putuo 8 even Miazimu 9
Had no idea TR even had rides beyond two hours - these are great thanks.
