Another thing that I find I don’t need to practice quite exactly like race day is time in the aerobars. On those .80 IF days I probably don’t spend more than 10-15 minutes at a time in aero, although I do it frequently through out the ride and I might do 30 minutes at a time during Whorl, the recovery ride. That was my strategy going into my last 70.3 last year, and I had no trouble staying in aero during the race, popping up to climb some hills and navigate some turns.
I’m not sure how aggressive your position on the bars is. For a 3-hour bike split I imagine it could be on the comfortable side. My first position (on a comfortably set up road bike with aerobars) was not that much lower than riding on the drops. Nowadays, on a fairly aggressively set up TT bike, I find pedalling on the bars is a lot harder than when sitting upright (probably a ~10% FTP difference).
I don’t think that changes the general principle. You don’t need to recreate race day to be ready to race well. In fact, I’d say that if your TT position is challenging enough that your FTP drops 10%, the most valuable steps to improving your power over time in it are going to look very different from recreating race day: improving mobility, working on your strength to hold the position, and doing VO2max work while in position.
You may be right, but holding the position is not a problem for me. The physio-fitter says I have very good lower back flexibility and mobility (for an office worker at least). It’s just that different muscles work differently.
This is me in 2016 - I could very well have been training upright:
I haven’t done a 70.3 since Sept. of 2017, but then I did follow the low volume BBS progression. I did most of my riding indoors with just a few outdoor rides. Those were all the weekend “long rides” and I did extend them to 2:30-2:45ish. I just went back and checked and I rode a 2:35 at that race. It was very windy from what I remember as there was a hurricane sitting just off the coast lol
Yes, in the base there are a few long rides. Maybe that’s part of the reason why I found the base working a lot better for me. The base itself is not so much different from build after all and I’d say buildish. But the mix with more endurance rides could work just better for me personally as Mikael was saying.
As for this thread: I’m done with build (though I cut it short by 1/2 week not counting recovery week as it just wasn’t productive training anymore) and I’m going a different route after I rested up. I’m going for 1 hard bike (ssp or vo2max), 1 hard run, at least 1 long ride, 1 long easy run and maybe 1 short brick run. Rest is just easy Z1, Z2 work as I see fit according to my state of fatigue.
So I guess it’s gonna be a pretty polarized approach and might post my experiences but I expect it to be a good match for me.
For those looking to throw in more long rides, take a look and compare against the High Volume Olympic Build/Specialty plans. They alternate longer rides, but not as long as the High Volume Half plans–still 4 rides per week each, but a little more variation in workouts and slightly less time per week (you could also drop one of the rides if you can only get 3 in per week while keeping the long rides every other weekend). I’m going to be trying that path for my final 14 weeks this year and see how it goes since I’ll be racing more Olympic/Olympic+ distance races over the summer building up to my 70.3 “A” race (70.3 Worlds in Nice, although that is pretty much an excuse to get back to Nice for a nice vacation ).
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