Lack of endurance ?

aw1808

After a hilly ride this weekend I noticed that during the last 10 miles my heart rate was very high with little effort , and had little energy in the legs . I had eaten enough etc and was fine until just after the 50th mile . I have had a bit of time off the bike due to a new addition to the family .

Does this sound like a lack of endurance and fitness which I have lost over the 3 months that I haven't ridden ?

imposter2.0

it does, yes.

aw1808

Any suggestions on how to increase it over a 6 week period ?

Road miles at low intensity or turbo in sweet spot ?

imposter2.0

A combination of both, I would suggest...

ric/rstsport

aw1808 wrote:

After a hilly ride this weekend I noticed that during the last 10 miles my heart rate was very high with little effort , and had little energy in the legs . I had eaten enough etc and was fine until just after the 50th mile . I have had a bit of time off the bike due to a new addition to the family .

Does this sound like a lack of endurance and fitness which I have lost over the 3 months that I haven't ridden ?

detraining occurs rapidly. In fact significant losses in fitness occur after just two weeks of no training. If you haven't ridden for 3 months then your fitness would likely returned to training/sedentary levels (of course if you have done some other exercise then you may have kept some fitness).

If you're looking to increase your fitness over the next 6 weeks then plenty of cycling at various intensities would help. why six weeks though? are you stopping again at this point? or do you have a goal in mind?

congrats on the new addition

aw1808

I'm looking to do the Exmoor beast as normal this year and have 8 weeks where I was intending to do sweet spot efforts 4 times a week for 45 -60 mins and then start throwing in intervals in later on .

Wrong idea?

The new addition has really written my year off bike wise but wouldn't change it and I was only 15 mins off silver standard on the sportive this weekend so wasn't that bad but it hurt and spent a large portion at the end of ride well over my threshold and struggled to get my heart rate down .

ric/rstsport

what training you should do would depend on your goals (is the Exmoor Beast the only event you're doing), the ability level you want to ride at (e.g. quicker versus slower), the amount of time you have to train (5 hrs a day would be different to 60-mins a day!), plus various other issues such as how trainable you are, how dedicated you are, etc, etc.

little ones are great

aw1808

I have about 6 hrs a week I can squeeze in at the moment a the baby is 3 months old and I just want to get a bit quicker and not suffer so much on the climbs . I'm a big lad so big focus on weight but not pie in the sky loss in kg's ( I'm ok with the calories in etc )

I know my threshold etc and my hr zones ( been tested previously ) which is why I suggested sweet spot training to get maximum endurance benefit from the same type of training .

Train quite well when focused on a goal and make progress when training correctly .

It's my second so I should have learnt the first time !!

ric/rstsport

sweetspot is good training, but there maybe other sessions that are important depending on the points that i made above. Either telling you what training to do is beyond the scope of a forum (feel free to give me a shout about the various options we offer for coaching or training)

ric