MTB CC Marathon Training - which workout should I replace?

TrainerRoad Software
1

Hi all,
I’m currently training for three MTB CC Marathon events. My training plan has 4 workouts scheduled each week. Tuesday a Vo2Max, Thursday Sweet Spot, Saturday Treshhold and Sunday Endurance.
Until now I did all of my workouts on my indoor trainer or outdoor on my road bike with power meter pedals.

The weather is getting better and my events are coming closer so I wanted to replace one workout with and MTB ride. Which of them would be the best replacement so that I won’t lose any benefit? I thought about replacing the Treshhold workout on Saturday? I would then ride for at least 2 hours with some elevation gain of 1000 meters and 30 to 40 km.

Any suggestions or tips for me?

Thanks

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Personally I’d do:

Tuesday VO2, Thursday Threshold, Saturday - outdoor Sweet Spot/Tempo Fartlek, Sunday - outdoor Z2.

Or, as you get closer to a Marathon type event and enter specialty phases, you need less VO2 work so you could also shift your focus to Threshold, Sweet Spot, Tempo and get rid of the VO2.

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3

Hey there and welcome to the TR community!

A couple of options for taking your training outdoors with TR include Outside Workouts and Group/Solo Rides.

Outside Workouts are great for following along with structured interval sessions, while Group/Solo Rides are better for unstructured riding.

Which workout you replace will depend on your plan for your outside ride. If you plan on riding relatively easily, then you could simply replace the Endurance session with some outdoor riding. If you were going to push it, though, then you should replace one of your harder sessions for the week with that ride. We’d recommend saving your “hardest” sessions that require the most structure for the trainer – so those would probably be your VO2 and Threshold workouts. Sweet Spot can be a little easier to “fudge” outdoors in a more unstructured manner by “naturally” riding pretty hard and trying to keep the pace up over the course of the ride.

Hope that helps – feel free to let us know if you have any additional questions!

4

Thanks to both of you. Your suggestions are going in the same direction. Doing the Sweet Sport session outdoors and/or replacing them with an harder MTB ride with some Tempo/Fartlek stuff. I’m going to give it a try. It should fit into my schedule very well.

Will keep the Vo2Max Session indoors because they require to much concentration which outdoors impossible due to the traffic and other stuff going around :slight_smile:

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