I am following a mid volume training plan with my main event being a 5 day 1000km Transpyrenees ride at the end of June. The route is 27,000m of climbing and I want to make sure I’m best able to complete this amount of elevation.
I’ve been listening to heaps of podcasts and as a result I have upped my endurance ride volume… the 2 endurance rides are now 2.5h and 4h each week outside. That leaves me 3 indoor workouts which I’ve given 1hr and 2x 1:15hr. At the moment the training plan is giving me a sweetspot, threshold and VO2 max workouts.
I think it’s beneficial to keep the endurance as endurance and I don’t want to add amy more days as I’m really aware of getting fatigued as I’m also doing strength training and nearer 53 than I was in 2024
With all that information I’m wondering if it would be of benefit to make the sweetspot workout an outdoor hill climb. I have a decent hill of 15kms that takes me a while to get up and I’m usually at about 190w (sweetspot for me) by the top… then of course on the downhill I end up with a total wattage of about 160w if I’m lucky
Would that be a good swap for the sweetspot workout?
I do find it difficult maintaining power on outdoor training rides on anything other than endurance… slopes, bends etc all seem to conspire against me. So I do them all indoors and just the endurance outside.
I started doing 20 min threshold efforts up a local hill last year for the first time. It is really difficult to keep the power totally consistent, but it gets easier (though probably never perfect) the more you do it. I find that keeping it to a 20 watt window (10 watts either side of my target) to be a good rule of thumb. The power does spike and drop within that window at times, but I’m usually able to stay within 5 watts or so of the target, and my average power is usually right on target.
This is obviously not as perfect as doing these intervals in ERG indoors, so it might not be optimal. However, I think it is way more natural and more similar to how efforts will work/feel in the real world.
Do the efforts outside if possible. It’s only going to be beneficial to your event.
Sure your watts won’t be as steady as erg mode but they won’t be steady during the event either and as long as you keep it around the power target you will get the same adaptations.
Depending on scheduling and the number of hard workouts in the plan I would do the threshold outside and keep it to ~2x hard session per week. However if the plan currently has 1x SST 1x ftp and 1x vo2 I would happily do the SST or ftp sessions outside.
You could try just subbing the sweetspot ride, but try to do the hill in sweetspot. See how that affects the rest of the week. Maybe after a month of that you’ll want to do the hill at threshold instead . Or, when the 15k gets too easy, turn around at the top, go back down about halfway, and climb back to the top.
With the event being 200km / 5,400m per day average, there is a case to be made for doing hill repeats on that 15km climb, at some point in the training.
Sounds like it would be a great swap! We’d even recommend trying out some of your Sweet Spot sessions as Outside Workouts if that’s feasible for you. A 15km climb should be plenty long enough for you to get some good efforts in.
You’re right that it can be tougher to do workouts outside rather than on the trainer… But with practice and time, you can really dial in how precisely you can hold power outdoors, too.
I’d absolutely move the indoor SS to outside climbing if possible. Some people will say “watts are watts”, but I find that climbing outside is needed when I have long climbing events on the calendar. It’s just a different flavor of pedaling for me. If I don’t do a bunch of real climbing volume during training, I won’t be able to express my aerobic fitness on long climbs in an event before muscles start failing. Not just legs, but back and core, etc.
I also wouldn’t worry too much about power being less consistent outside. If you are on a climb where the grade is changing, just aim to keep watts close. If 190w is your SS target, it shouldn’t be a big deal to drop to 170w for a bit and surge higher as well. Just keep it close and you are working the energy system just fine. As others have said, staying steady gets easier with time and you’ll learn how to keep the watts up when the grade levels off and also keep watts in check when it gets steep. Again, really good training for your race. Having the habit of maintaining watts when the road levels out or starts descending is very useful in races. Lots of people get dropped when hammering up a hill and then easing at the top and letting a little gap form.
Switching your indoor sweet sport to that outdoor climb will absolutely help. It helps mentally as much as anything, as it helps you gauge what you can actually do outdoors on a real hill.
Nearer your event there’s also something to be said for combining your endurance and sweet spot sessions. During the event you are going to be climbing hills after many more hours than four. Thus doing a session where you either do your sweet spot first, then carry on for a couple of hours of endurance or the other way round can be really good for building fatigue resistance and mental resilience.
Good luck with the race. A friend did it a couple of years ago. Part of his training was a 200km ride, with a hilly 50km in the middle. Thus 75km rolling terrain, 50km hilly terrain, then 75km rolling terrain. He’d do this once a month to build confidence and fatigue resistance without interrupting the rest of his training too much.
