A quick ride at lunchtime?

CaerlyrOsprey

Hi all,

Apart from the enjoyment of it, is there any benefit in going out for a ride at lunchtime?

I have been cycling just over a year, and only now am I seeing my average speeds and weekly distances increase. However, now the nights will start drawing in, I am looking to see how I can fit in as much time on my bike as possible.

I have a flattish route of 15 miles that I can just about do in 45 mins. Is this a ride worth getting hot and sweaty for? Or should I just accept the bike will be for weekends only?

Cheers,

Kev

diamonddog

Ride it.

sloppyschleckonds

1 x 1's

BigFatBloke

CaerlyrOsprey wrote:

Hi all,

Apart from the enjoyment of it, is there any benefit in going out for a ride at lunchtime?

I have been cycling just over a year, and only now am I seeing my average speeds and weekly distances increase. However, now the nights will start drawing in, I am looking to see how I can fit in as much time on my bike as possible.

I have a flattish route of 15 miles that I can just about do in 45 mins. Is this a ride worth getting hot and sweaty for? Or should I just accept the bike will be for weekends only?

Cheers,

Kev

You can make excellent use of a 45 to 60 minute ride. Use the first 5 to 10 minutes as a progressive warm up and then do 20 or 30 minutes at just below, at or just above your maximum sustainable pace which you could hold for about an hour (Functional Threshold Power in power meter parlance or threshold heart rate). You could even do 2 x 20 minute efforts or 2 x 15 min efforts.

Obviously if you are fatigued you do not have to go that hard but if you feel up to it go for it.

If there is traffic or it is not safe to ride hard for 20 or 30 minutes you can still make good use of it by treating the parts of the circuit where you can go hard as intervals.

You can really benefit from these lunchtime efforts, particularly if you add them to an evening turbo session. You will have had some time to recover for the evening session but if you are not so fit you may find the evening session harder than normal due to the lunchtime ride, so see how you feel. You may not want to start out doing a lunch time session every day on top of an evening turbo session - see how it goes.

If you break up your rides, say a 20 min hard effort on the way to work, 20 minutes at lunch time and then 20 minutes home you can do the 3 x 20 at a higher intensity than you could if you crammed in an evening 3 x 20 because you have had hours of recovery between the sessions.

Training at lunch time and in the evening can be hard so do not over do it and make sure you eat enough decent food.

A lunch time ride really revs up the metabolism and you need to avoid stuffing down junk food or energy bars after the lunchtime ride instead of eating a decent balanced lunch. Plan lunch in advance, there is nothing worse than getting back from a ride starving hungry and having to run out to a shop for lunch and finding nothing decent to eat so you end up eating 6 bags of crisps and 4 Mars bars. Even worse is missing lunch and starving all afternoon.

If you are unable to shower after the lunch time ride at least make sure your clothes and cycling gear are freshly washed and you start the day showered and wear deodorant. Good clean sweat won't stink, but your workmates will be pretty annoyed if you spend the afternoons humming like a dead badger.

If you do decide to train on the roads in the dark, choose where carefully and light yourself up and make sure you can be seen - this is just as important if not more important than being able to see any pot holes.


Sorry if that was a bit rambling - rattled it off a bit fast but I am very pro lunch time rides, particularly if used as supplementary to usual evening or morning rides.

CaerlyrOsprey

Thanks for the advice, chaps.

Decided to go for it, I work in Solihull so I treated the first 2 miles cycling in the traffic as a warm up. Once on the country roads, I rode a preplanned flat 10mile time trial, which worked really well. Then crawled thru' the traffic back to the office.

All in all, I was out for 50 minutes and covered 15.5miles, 10 of which were cycled flat out. Felt really good all afternoon, and got some kudos from my non cycling work colleagues for cycling "all that way".

Cheers for the advice.

Kev

diamonddog

Nice warm up and warm down after a nice lunch time ride.:)