Training plan for fun?

Training
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I finished my “main” event of the summer and I don’t have anything planned for the fall currently. For the past 3 years, I’ve been primarily training for longer gravel/endurance events, and I’ll try to see if I can do some combination of Unbound/Leadville/etc next year. That being said, I figured most of my training has been some combination of SS/VO2 max work/threshold/etc, with very little work on things like sprinting/etc. Does anyone have any suggestions on what kind of plan I might try for the rest of the summer/early fall to mix things up? It looks like TR has added the ability to set up a 3 month training block, with 4 weeks of base/build/specialty. Is that what I’m looking at?

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Have you considered just using the TrainNow feature fora while, and picking the offering that looks good for the day?

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I like the periodization that structured plans provide.

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The Maintenance plans? They’re under Specialty → Enthusiast. Or browse all the Specialty plans for variety. E.g., the Crit plan has a lot of anaerobic workouts.

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You can try block periodization for a while to mix things up:

  • 2 weeks max effort sprints (e.g. Z7/5x20-30sec with 5-min recovery), 2-3x/week
  • 2 weeks VO2max with 4-6 min intervals, 2-3x/week
  • 1 recovery week
  • 2 weeks VO2max with 5-8 min intervals, 2-3x/week
  • 1 recovery week
  • continue with SS/Z4 block

This plan is from blog post. I did first 7 weeks during spring, gave me really strong boost (lifetime PRs in whole range 10-30sec). Like you, I am focused on long steady rides, I don’t really need this kind of sharpening but it was really fun.

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I’ve been riding for fun this summer rather than specifically Time Trialing or multi day group rides, which were my A events in the past, and I’ve set up a “Road - Maintaining Fitness” Plan with a theoretical A event date.

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@Toasterthief I’d pick one of those three-month “General Fitness” training plans.

If you want to change it up, there are lots of different options to choose from.

If you’re historically trained for long events, maybe pick something with some anaerobic efforts to shake things up. I strongly believe that anaerobic efforts are highly underrated!

Something like road or MTB, “Getting faster for group rides” might be fun. :grin:

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One thing I’ve done was Train Now workouts as they came and did them same days and times as if I where on a training plan.
I did this back in January to March and enjoyed the random workouts before officially starting the CX Training plan.
This did improve my FTP but probably was not the most effective way of doing it.
Just have to remember to added a rest week, that one thing I didn’t know back then.

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