Curious what your favorite workouts are for building race-specific fatigue resistance.
It is my experience that many races are won in a couple of key scenarios. A) an 8-10 minutes supra-threshold effort in the last 5km B) a 4-6 minute VO2 max effort in the last 3km C) a 20-30 minute sweet spot effort in the last 10 km
I’ve drawn up a custom workout that I hope can help me overcome this limiter, I’ll likely do this outdoors to be more real-world:
I didn’t do it specifically for racing but wanted to work on fatigue resistance to feel better near the ends of long endurance rides and zwift fondos. Workouts weren’t structured but ended up being kinda similar to what the article @sryke linked described. I mostly did it with sweet spot / threshold / suprathreshold efforts during my preparation / base phase.
Phase 1: Extend weekend endurance ride to desired length (4hrs for me this year), Perform SS/threshold/suprathreshold/intervals as part of shorter structured workouts that I do during the week and come into rested.
Phase 2: Once I’m feeling good / strong at the end of my long ride I started to throw in 1-3 intervals in the last 30min of the workout (so about 3.5hrs in.) Started with 1x10min SS → 2x10min SS, then would pick several 3-8min hills for the threshold/suprathreshold efforts and occasionally a couple of 1-2min hills for VO2max efforts. My goal was never to go all out or simulate race conditions, so I kept it to 1-3 intervals and I would keep them much shorter than I would do as part of a structured workout. Sometimes I would also pick some hills earlier in the ride for similar efforts as well. I’ve also done these in zwift group rides or fondos if it was appropriate for the time and group I was with.
Definitely noticed a difference in the way I felt at the end of ‘regular’ 4hr endurance rides and zwift events under 2.5hrs in duration. Much easier to throw down those high-power efforts after a lot of kJs burned and I’m sure there is also a mental benefit related to dealing with the discomfort of those efforts while carrying a lot of physical and mental fatigue. I started doing this after seeing one of @brendanhousler videos where he discussed kJ deep intervals.
I started to experiment this year with intervals scattered during longer ride and this is pretty entertaining way to do longer rides and always rewarding. Here is an example workout. The last interval can be pushed later to be closer to the 2500 kj:
I probably averaged about two a month from mid September to mid March. I maxed out the duration of my long Saturday ride in early August and probably took 5-6 weekends of the long ride before I started to feel relatively good at the end. That was when I started adding intervals near the end.
I probably ‘aimed’ to do they every long ride during that timeframe, but went on feel and didn’t have any concerns with not doing them if I wasn’t feeling great. Also, I mostly ride solo or did the BMTR Flat 100 in Zwift which helped me with zone discipline prior to the intervals.
It is hard but not a super hard workout. For me, it was a good part of the progression to mix things up and test some fueling. You can try it with shorter intervals like 3x10 or 3x15 to test how you would feel.
I feel like any long Sweet Spot workout is a good fatigue resistant workout. Might be even better than threshold after 2.5 hours of Z2. Most road/gravel races are at tempo/SS.
