Quick background: I have been cycling for about 3 years, did my first two races last year one being Leadville 100. Prior to that 10 years of CrossFit, got pretty good at it but not quite competitor level.
I love mountain biking, but need more variety than just cycling. I also have a very demanding job with a lot of travel. In a good week I can workout 4x. A great week 5x. I want to split my workouts to 2 cycling workouts a week and 2 strength/CrossFit workouts a week.
My cycling goal is to maximize fitness on my typical 1-2 hour mountain bike rides. And hopefully continue to set PR’s on the rides a frequent here in the front range of CO.
My question is: where should I focus those 2 rides per week (VO2, threshold, sweet spot)? I have about 4 months of indoor training before outside riding is appealing.
I think you can get what you need using Plan Builder - you can set it up with a low volume plan, and tell it that you don’t have any events.
If you put in that you’re training for Olympic XC racing (1-2 hours high intensity mountain biking) then it’ll give you 3 bike workouts a week, or if you put in Offroad Triathlon it’ll give you 2 bike workouts a week and you can replace swim/run workouts with crossfit… I’d like to say that using the tri plan would work better, as the bike planning should take into account the TSS from other workouts but I don’t think it quite works like that yet…
Others will know this better than me, but I believe that using Plan Builder like this will give you base/build cycles which should work better than just picking Sweet Spot Base as a plan, or selecting VO2/Threshold/Endurance workouts as you go along.
I would start with short power low vol I BUILD. I would do the Saturday workout for sure every week. On Tuesday of every week I’d decide whether I wanted to do the Tuesday or the Thursday workout for that week. Probably for the first four weeks I’d do the Tuesday workout & for the second four weeks I’d do the Thursday workout.
