I’m planning on doing steamboat gravel on June 28th. We’re planning a family trip to the south of France, leaving on June 6th and coming back June 16th. Is there anything I can do training wise to prepare for this? Maybe plan on a hard/heavy week leading up to the trip, with a rest/recovery week in that week of vacation?
Maybe I can convince my wife that I need to ride a bike on vacation?
Just make sure you take “hard week” in context of your current training. If you currently only ride 7 hours a week, don’t go try to do a 20hr week going into the break. Also, make sure you know what your vacation will look like. If it’s just sitting at a resort and getting massages at the spa then you can go in decently cooked. But if your vacations are more active with hikes, walking tours, etc then don’t go too crazy.
It’s easy to discount the fatigue from lower intensity exercise like that but if you go from ~6k steps a day to 15-20k steps a day then that could cause some decent fatigue.
Just some things to take into account! Also, if your wife/family is up to it (and certainly don’t push it) maybe see if you can get a bike rental for a couple days in the middle just to keep the cycling muscles ‘warm’.
I do wish TR could implement training camps as a feature, like they talked about back in the day. The ability to schedule a “hard” week would be great.
I used to travel a good bit for work (30-40 trips a year), sometimes including hopping over to Europe. I got sick a number of times on these trips after ramping the training up to “make up” for the forced time off, presumably from additional travel stress, sleep quality issues, etc. Now I take the opposite approach, backing off training if anything, and making sure I’m well rested and recovered and just try to get back healthy! If you have time off AND get sick, then you’re really going to struggle.
Personally, I’d rent a bike out there. It’s your vacation too, nothing wrong with exploring the country side 3-4 of the 10 days while the family is taking a nap or relaxing for a couple of hours, or waking up early while they are sleeping in to get some training in.
Two things I’d add, in addition to the concept of planning your training to finish on a hard week before the trip:
Plan for alternative workouts while in France. Strength, core, running? And by “plan” i mean start to integrate some of that in your current training so that you don’t go from 0 to multiple sessions in those 10 days.
Travel increases your risk of getting sick. Use the standard precautions to avoid catching a bug.
This has happened to me almost every planned vacation. Went from 10k steps a day to 20k+ steps for 3 days straight. I needed a vacation from my vacation.