Hi everyone. I’ve usually doing a longer ride on the weekends, 70-80 miles on Sat or Sun. However, due to some family things and a couple of events we have on the calendar those weekends are going to be disrupted. Normally I wouldn’t care so much except we have have several of them and my wife and I just spent some time in Europe where I missed two weekends in a row with zero riding in between. So my fitness has fallen quite a lot.
In replacement of these 70-80 mile rides I should have time to work in a 50 mile ride. So my general thoughts are instead of doing 2 hrs at Z2 and an hour at Z3 and some intervals which normally are what my long rides look like. I may just do a Z3/Z4 ride for all 50ish miles.
My hope would be that would allow for maintaining fitness and keeping my aerobic base intact despite quite a lot less time.
Thoughts or recommendations would be good so I can squeeze the most out. of these 2.5 hr rides.
What does the rest of your training look like? How many other days are you riding hard?
2.5 hours can feel a bit long for Sweet Spot or Threshold work, but I do like your idea of riding easy for the first half or so and then progressively picking things up and adding effort toward the end.
Again, it’s important to keep your weekly structure balanced, though, so if you’re already doing some hard work during the week, I’d keep those weekend rides easy. 2.5 hours is enough for a solid endurance ride!
Agree with eddie that part of it would depend on what the rest of your plan looks like. You can definitely make the mistake of making this ride so hard that it makes the rest of your week unproductive.
But looking at this ride in isolation, I think it’s probably a good candidate to add some intervals into it.
For example, take a SS workout that you know you can do and spread it out over the 2.5 hours. So if you normally do 3x20 with 10 minutes in between, try doing that but with 30 minutes in between. I do this through the winter and I’ve found it’s been an awesome way to build aerobic capacity. You may also find that (if you fuel well) you can do a bit more interval time by extending the periods in between.
Just make sure that this fits into your plan and you might need to replace one of your other interval workouts with endurance to make this fit.
Thanks for the reply this is really for only a couple weeks and then I may intermittently apply in the future as needed. Basically this ride would be followed by a rest day. I couldn’t spent 2.5hrs at threshold but could easily do 2.5 hours middle of Z3. So maybe do some Z3 with sweet spot or threshold intervals lasting 6-10mins each or something.
Rest of the week has a couple of weight training days, a threshold day on Monday, Z2 on weds, VO2 on Thurs. Fri may or may not ride depending on work most weeks, but it’s easy. Sat is long ride mixed intensity. Mon/Thurs is usually weight training as well. Attached is a fairly normal week.
I’d consider those Monday and Wednesday Tempo rides as hard, not easy. In that case, I’d probably recommend keeping Saturday easy, especially if you’re going to ride on Friday.
We only recommend three days of intensity to even the most advanced athletes on TR. In your case, it looks like you’re already doing three hard days, but they aren’t as hard as they could be. I’d recommend bumping those two Tempo workouts up to Sweet Spot and Threshold, and then keeping all of your other riding easy.
This is often a better solution as it allows you to get enough tough stimulus in each week, but also leaves enough room between workouts for recovery. The direction you’re going is by trying to spread all that intensity across more days of the week, which doesn’t get the same stimulus as those harder workouts, and also doesn’t leave as much room for recovery. They say, “Keep your hard days hard and your easy days easy.”
One way to achieve this without much effort is to get on a TrainerRoad plan. You can set up your schedule however you’d like, and we’ll manage the rest.
Let me know if this helps and if you have any other questions.
Yeah Mondays are usually threshold. Wednesday I’ve been playing with Tempo but may drop it to all Z2 like I did today which gives me some headroom for harder saturday ride. I like having a rest day after a harder ride.
Whatever you end up settling on, we typically recommend 2-3 hard workouts each week.
If you’re doing a hard group ride or solo ride, that counts as one of your hard workouts.
The more of your structured training you replace with unstructured riding, the less efficient your training will become..
If I were you, I’d try to get at least two hard TR workouts in, one hard group ride (if this is something you want), and one solo endurance ride each week.
Well, the latest podcast with Keegan encapsulates perfectly how I do my endurance rides, never been a fan of strict zone 2 unless the legs require it, all my weekend endurance rides are more moderate and end up IF 0.75. Its a way to get more TSS in, like Keegan says.
2-3 hours both weekend days feels fantastic, especially after intervals midweek.
