Working up to 4-6 hours, sometimes with “stuff”, for a 9 hour rider makes perfect sense to me.
I think she said over the course of the season we can get more stress by doing the volume in 2 days vs. 1 day. Which I don’t understand. She forwarded me the Leadville podcast with Joe Friel and he was saying stamina is super important, high intensity work is not super important. Find our where you see cardiac decoupling then push that out. 5 hours at IF 0.75 is excellent stamina in one of his examples. She had a workout with 16 five second sprints in a 3 hour workout for today…which again, I do not understand.
I did Hemp today and at my level it’s four 46 minute intervals at 159, 156, 159, 156, and 159 watts. For the 159 watt intervals, #'s 1, 3, and 5 my HR was 108, 108 and 115 and it certainly felt different on the last one. Is that cardiac decoupling? I’ve gotta think that two 2 hour rides and never pushing that decoupling wouldn’t be as good. Depending on the ability to recover I guess.
This also makes perfect sense…although tempo for more than a couple of hours sounds super tough at this point!
Yes exactly! Instead of 3 hours with a bunch of 5 second sprints I went 4 hours on Hemp, IF 0.55, hoping to up the IF on a weekly long ride.
Sorry for the complete and utter thread hijack but appreciate the comments!
Seems like you should have a conversation with your coach and if you’re not seeing eye to eye on your training, or she’s not communicating the “why” to you very well, then it’s only April and you’ve got time to move on. There’s a real disconnect here beyond “who is right”; you guys are not on the same philosophical page and that needs to be sorted out sooner rather than later. She may be an outstanding coach, but at the same time just not the right coach for you.
Decoupling is a bit overrated because a lot goes into it - hydration, conditions (heat/sun), rest?, caffeine?, etc. etc. It’s not great to look at for one ride, but compiling that data over the course of several months can show trends and THAT you can make decisions on.
That said, most people - even very fit ones - will see some decoupling in that 3-4 hour range, so to use that as your only measure of when to progress your long rides is kind of a mistake in my opinion. I do use it, but not dogmatically.
Yeah you work up to it, but it is SUPER race-specific for ultra events that involve long climbing.
Then you did it too hard for a base endurance ride and you should lower the power and go super easy. 50% isn’t out of the question. Seriously.
Absolutely. But if you’re training for Leadville, you’re laying the groundwork for a lot of race specific training in June and July. You’re ramping up volume / TSS / CTL and by then, you want to be able to go out and do the bigger volume and do those long Tempo, Endurance, Sweet Spot sessions.
Think of it as preparing yourself for the three climbs left when you hit mile 80 in the heat of the day with 6-7 or more hours in your legs already…
I’m doing this in my training for an upcoming event. I decided to go with tacking on an extra 30min-1hr of zone 2 at the end of each ride (apart from Wednesday) to get up the TSS. It ends up giving me anywhere from 2-3hrs more a week on the bike that way. Seems to be working for me thus far! I really like having 2 days off and prefer to keep it that way.
You send people out on 5 hours at 55% when they only have done, at the most, 2 hours on the bike? You don’t ramp them up progressively? Seriously, all I was suggesting was that maybe his coach has a plan.
Honestly, I don’t even like to sit on a bike for 5 hours.
I did the Ephrata Gran Fondo last Sunday up here in Washington - 3.75hrs ride time. The longest ride I did this winter was 2 hours on the trainer with a 4x20 @ FTP (building out TTE). I did ok. We didn’t ride endurance pace.
240 minutes and no decoupling! That 4 hour segment was at .78 IF and temps dropped a little, for that segment it started around 3pm and 70F, and I finished back home at 61F. So temps were pretty stable, not much of a factor. Those were the days, those were the days…
Yeh, like knowing how the back, neck, gut, wrists, & perineum are going to feel at hour 5, or whether you get cramps etc, & even how they cope mentally when things turn to , which someone probably won’t know if the longest ride they’ve done in a while is two hours. I was that guy a couple of weeks ago that started getting gut distress 13 hours in & 100km from home as the sun was setting, it was getting cold, & I was unable to put out enough power to stay comfortably warm & still know I wasn’t going to blow up. To add injury to insult my left foot got very sore. Enjoyed my solo adventure up to then but the last five hours were pretty miserable. Longest ride up to that point was about 15 hours which I finished in daylight. Granted, I was experimenting with different nutrition strategies this time, but it took that many hours of riding for all of these difficulties to rear their ugly heads.
This is what I was wondering too. I’d think advice would have to be context-specific, depending not just upon the plan but also the athlete’s capacity to train & to recover. If I was doing two days of intervals & a third day of endurance, I’d have no hesitation adding an extra day of endurance, but if I was already on the bike five days a week plus adding strength work, & a coach wanted me to do a sixth session on the bike yeah I’d be thinking more about recovery & then asking what’s the most efficient way I could productively add to the sessions I’m already doing.
There’s something to pushing that limit. I’ve done a bunch of 5+ hr rides. Several sub-5 centuries. 2022 I took on a 200 miler, 11+ hrs of riding in 16, plenty of stops for food etc. Guy who organized it asked if I was doing it again last year and I told him to go straight to hell.
That sounds miserable. Not the riding part, but stopping for 5 hours (almost 1/3 of the total time). In my experience, there is nothing that makes a long ride feel harder than long/frequent stops. The body/mind shuts down every time you stop and then feels like crap when you get back on the bike.
Long stops for sure yes, but somewhat frequent microstops have been fine in my experience. The last long distance I did was 14 hours riding, and I think 16 hours total. One mid day 30 minute stop for lunch, main reason for stopping that long was to let some digestion happen. Other stops were maybe 5 mins here or there to reload bidons or get some ice ( it was mid June) and such.
, which someone probably won’t know if the longest ride they’ve done in a while is two hours. I was that guy a couple of weeks ago that started getting gut distress 13 hours in & 100km from home as the sun was setting, it was getting cold, & I was unable to put out enough power to stay comfortably warm & still know I wasn’t going to blow up. To add injury to insult my left foot got very sore. Enjoyed my solo adventure up to then but the last five hours were pretty miserable. Longest ride up to that point was about 15 hours which I finished in daylight. Granted, I was experimenting with different nutrition strategies this time, but it took that many hours of riding for all of these difficulties to rear their ugly heads.
yeah I’d be thinking more about recovery & then asking what’s the most efficient way I could productively add to the sessions I’m already doing.