Basic Fitness Question

Wormishere1

Hi,

A mountain biker here sorry (people of the mtb forum consider questions about fitness a sin) but I was wondering if you can help.

I have a general base level of fitness riding around 5 hours a week (2 on a Friday night and 3 on a Sunday). Living in Wensleydale the rides are not exactly flat. For example, this Fridays ride was 21km and 650m climb and this mornings ride was 32km and 700m climb.

Reading into basic fitness training plans there appears to be a lot of merit in riding slow and steady for long periods to, I think, build up endurance and base fitness.

My question is, given the vertical nature of most of my rides (and the inability to ride 'slow and long' without really pushing the elevation sky high) will my performance suffer if I ride for longer than I am used to on lesser terrain. For example me and a friend are planning a mtb Dales crossing, 108km, 1600m. Obviously this will take a lot longer than my normal rides and take me out of my normal zone.

Is there any way of knowing how I will fare over these longer distances with less climbs other than getting out and doing them? Sorry for the convolouted message but I hope you understand my question.

Thanks

petemadoc

I'd say don't stress about it too much, just get out and enjoy the ride with your buddy. 108k off-road will be a challenge, just make sure you eat and drink enough and don't go out too hard at the start. How will you fare? Well you'll probably be cream crackered but that's half the fun isn't it

bahzob

Wormishere1 wrote:

Hi,

...
I have a general base level of fitness riding around 5 hours a week (2 on a Friday night and 3 on a Sunday). Living in Wensleydale the rides are not exactly flat. For example, this Fridays ride was 21km and 650m climb and this mornings ride was 32km and 700m climb.

Reading into basic fitness training plans there appears to be a lot of merit in riding slow and steady for long periods to, I think, build up endurance and base fitness.
.....

This is actually a bit of a contentious subject. There is a considerable body of evidence showing that even for endurance riders doing shorter sharper intervals is as good as or even more effective than doing slow and steady.

This is even more the case when you factor in time available for training. Slow and steady rides need a lot of training time, if you don't have that they can be pretty useless.

In your case, 5 hours a week is really not very much. So I'd definitely advise training focussed on short hard efforts, which if you are MTBing is probably what you get a lot of anyway. If possible I'd also try to do something mid week, 5 rest days really is a bit too much.

An e.g would be an short but extremely hard session (e.g repeat 20s absolute max effort 20s rest til exhaustion). This will only take 20 minutes or so but should give your body enough of a kick to come out of recovery mode.

All that being said as above you will probably do fine anyway. Good luck

Wormishere1

Hi,

Thanks for your answers. I will try and start getting out mid-week. Every corner around here there is a cat 4 or cat 3 climb for me to play on so I will try some exercises like you say.

I might also start riding the roads to my local trails (10k and around 350m climb) - who needs cars anyway!

bahzob

Wormishere1 wrote:

I might also start riding the roads to my local trails (10k and around 350m climb) - who needs cars anyway!

If that's an option its a great one. Riding a MTB on roads is very good endurance training,. If the terrain allows an option on the way out would be to do a "ramp" increasing effort a notch every km or thereabouts so that by the end you do a solid km at an effort that makes you breathe pretty hard through the mouth at a pace you feel you could just about hold for another 10-20mins or so. This should be a good warmup and the end effort is around so called "threshold" which you may see referred to here or in other places. This is a useful reference point. Above this level pain starts to kick in very quickly and efforts will be measured in minutes, below pain should be a long time coming and efforts will be measured in hours.

Doing longish intervals at this intensity can boost fitness and will form part of most every road cyclist's training program. If your usual MTB rides include some longer (8+ minutes) sections then this is the sort of intensity to try to hold for these. Alternatively you could try doing these on the way back if you feel up to it and the terrain allows.

kajjal

Combining mountain biking and road biking is very useful. Mountain biking is about rapid speed changes and bike handling where as road biking is about smooth power delivery over a long period of time.

MikeWW

For the longer endurance based rides I'd work on trying to get you body adapted to fat burning

Have a look at this http://mcnutsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/fat-adaptation-fuel-efficiency-part-ii.html