How hard to train?

Newlife

First post although have been browsing for a while.

Quick background is that I am 43 years old, have been cycling since late June last year and properly training since late September. My initial focus for training was a 100 mile sportive this April.

As the start of my training came during the worse part of the year, especially with all the rain, much of my training was indoors on the work gym bike. A very uncomfortable bit of kit but you can get into a semi road position and do some decent training on it. So last few months have been lots of interval work and out on the roads at the weekends and a few evenings. I currently train 5 days a week which is usually 3 hard sessions and 2 easy ones and the other 2 days off. I know that I have the 100 miler in my legs already (have had 6 or 7 rides over 50 miles so far with longest 71 which was far hillier than the sportive will be) but am looking to do a decent time so will keep pushing for that. Currently I do around 16mh over a moderate hilly (3,500ft of climbing according to Strava) 50 miles solo.

My main focus longer term is to become the best hill climber I can be as I think my weight and body type lends itself to that. After the sportive I will join the local cycling club so want to be ready for that too as they only have 2 groups and the slow one is already too slow for me but want to be ready for the faster one.

What I am unsure of is how hard I can train and how many miles is a good weekly total to shoot for to keep improving. I understand enough of training to avoid "junk" miles although given that I am still building a fitness base there may be no such thing for me at my current level. Also as my winter training has been very structured with all the interval work, mainly at threshold or harder, I am not sure about how to replicate this properly on the road. My local area does not lend itself to full on efforts of 5, 10 or 20+ minutes as there are too many junctions and traffic lights. There are a couple of decent hills I can use for hill repeats so have that covered at least.

Given my current level of fitness, which I class as decent but still a long way to go, what is the most effective use of my time for outdoor riding now that the weather is improving? Is it simple to get the miles in at a good pace? If so, how hard should I push and how often can I do this without overtraining? I also have read that muscle tiredness/soreness should not necessarily stop you training, how far can this be taken before I really need to rest and absorb the training?

Sorry for so many questions but I want to find the balance between working hard to get the best results without overdoing it and not progressing as I should. The $64,000 question I know, but any pointers from those who have been in my shoes and have enjoyed very good progress going forward would be appreciated.

imposter2.0

That club you mentioned? Just join it now. If you want to generally bring on your cycling fitness, that will almost certainly be the most effective and efficient way in the short/medium term. That and frequent rides at varied efforts and distances.

Generally, you improve by regularly pushing yourself beyond your current limits in terms of effort or endurance, or both - so that club ride which you 'aren't ready for yet' sounds ideal.

ai_1

Disclaimer: I'm no expert on training.

It sounds like you're doing a lot of hard efforts. Hard short efforts and much easier long ones are likely the best way to go. Long easy-ish miles should be fine back to back. When I was getting started I made a concerted effort NOT to go too fast on longer rides. I aimed to keep my HR just below 70% for longer rides and over a few months the same effort and HR started consistently producing faster times.

Stalin

Imposter wrote:

That club you mentioned? Just join it now. If you want to generally bring on your cycling fitness, that will almost certainly be the most effective and efficient way in the short/medium term. That and frequent rides at varied efforts and distances.

Generally, you improve by regularly pushing yourself beyond your current limits in terms of effort or endurance, or both - so that club ride which you 'aren't ready for yet' sounds ideal.

By regularly he does not mean every ride. If you push yourself to your limits too often without adequate recovery you will stunt your progress.

bahzob

You have already got yourself into good training habits. If time is limited, as for most folks it is, then this time is best spent doing harder intensity work.

I would not worry overmuch about pushing yourself too hard. You are right, your muscles should feel sore the day after hard exercise, this is called DOMS and is a sign you have been training hard enough to provoke the body into adapting which is what you want to happen. This soreness should not stop you training. In fact the converse is the case, if you don't feel a bit sore the next day then its a sign you could try harder.

Train as hard as you can. If there is a problem you will notice it when you can't complete a workout that you should have. In practice though, if you are already having 2 days a week off, the chances of this are low. The only risk really comes if, like the pros, you try to double up daily workouts or try train hard 7 days a week (though even this isn't too bad provided you plan a couple of days full rest, which is why pros use events like tours as "training")

Few other things:
- You can do 100 miles now. I'd get that monkey off your back and just go out and ride 100 miles and more next time the weather forecast is good.
- If you want to get a bit more structure into your training I recommend "Time Crunched Cyclist". I despise the author but the book is very good, especially for people like you. It focuses on shorter higher intensity training and comes with 12 week plans that are straightforward to understand and give good structure/motivation. It will answer all your training specific questions above.
- As above I'd suggest joining the local club now and just doing the fast run. Provided you can get yourself home don't worry about getting dropped, indeed welcome that. It means the group is worth riding with (many are nice for a chat but a total waste of time training wise). Being with a group will make you push yourself harder and give you a measure of progress. Also the bike skills involved in riding fast in a good group are invaluable when riding, alone or in a sportive.
- Shortly your local club (or others nearby) should be starting to run some time trials. Try to find out where/when these are. Just doing them is very good training in itself. What's more the routes they use will be designed to be fast and stop free so can be used for training purposes too.
- I'd advise picking a late season goal for when you should be at absolute peak fitness. Could be linked to a sportive though these can be a bit problematic unless they are run as full on races which most here are not. One good measure is your time for a 25 mile ride so establishing a PB for this that you can use as a reference next year would be good.
- If you haven't already done so get a good bike fit. It should cost £100 or more and involve you actually pedalling your bike at high power. It may sound costly but is the single best investment a cyclist can make and will pay for itself many times over.
- Decide how seriously you expect to get into cycling and how motivated you are to be the best that you can be. If you think you really are hooked then next purchase should be a power meter. Used correctly this has the capacity to transform your training and give you the best chance of doing as well as you possibly can in events.

(FWIW my background is that I started cycling a while back when I was a bit older than you are now. Thankfully I didn't bother to read any forums, I just trained by riding as hard as I could and trying to beat PBs on various routes. If I didn't feel shattered I thought I was taking it easy. Glad I did that as it worked out very well and done some pretty impressive things on a bike since, including riding the full tour de France route and being one of top finishers in sportives here and abroad, including Marmotte/Etape. Quite sure I have been a lot more successful and had fun than had I realised the idea of "overtraining" existed,)

Stalin

Dr Andrea Coggan and Eileen Hunter, the training with power experts, would not agree with you Bahzob.

imposter2.0

Stalin wrote:

Dr Andrea Coggan and Eileen Hunter, the training with power experts, would not agree with you Bahzob.

The 'name' thing was only amusing the first time, Trev.

Stalin

Imposter wrote:

Stalin wrote:

Dr Andrea Coggan and Eileen Hunter, the training with power experts, would not agree with you Bahzob.

The 'name' thing was only amusing the first time, Trev.

I have to post things more than once because the mods remove half my posts.

BenderRodriguez

Imposter wrote:

Generally, you improve by regularly pushing yourself beyond your current limits in terms of effort or endurance, or both - so that club ride which you 'aren't ready for yet' sounds ideal.

I'm not sure about this at all. Lets say that a rider could go out today and thrash themselves for 120km with 3 - 4 thousand meters of climbing and average between 23 and 24 km/hr which, if they went as hard as they could, would be their current limit. I don't think that they would need to do so much in order to see a training effect, nor would they have to do even more the next time out in order to see any progress.

To my way of thinking what is needed is not to push yourself beyond your current limits each time you go out, but to go hard / long enough to induce sufficient fatigue so that your body needs to recover and so adapt. This effort will probably be a lot less than you could do as a 'one off'. As they say, when it comes training, 'sufficient' is always better than 'more'.

Another way to think about it is to look at what sort of daily work load you can sustain when training perhaps 5 days per week. A ride like the one above might take days to recover from so, naturally, if you are training regularly, each individual ride will have to be easier than you could do as a 'one off'. What matters is your total, cumulative training load and how this is progressed.

That said, it seems that for some riders thrashing themselves to their absolute limit and then taking a lot of time off to recover can work. For example, this is what Obree advocates in his book, with him saying that after one of his intense training sessions (which for him meant 20 - 30 minutes on the turbo or a 2 hour fasted endurance ride) it often took him 4 or more days before he was recovered enough to do it again, at which point he would try to ride even harder than the last time!

For most, I think that a balance of the two approaches would also work, with a particularly hard session being followed by extra recovery days but the main focus being on the total cumulative load. For example, if you can do 2 hours per day for five days per week but just two rides of four hours at the same intensity (given the extra time needed for recovery) then the shorter sessions will give a total training load that is 20% higher, and so should lead to greater adaptation.

As ever YMMV!

Stalin

Re Obree taking 3 or 4 days to recover from an all out turbo effort of 20 or 30 minutes - this is why I'm suspicious of people who claim they can train hard every day and race almost every week.

imposter2.0

BenderRodriguez wrote:

Imposter wrote:

Generally, you improve by regularly pushing yourself beyond your current limits in terms of effort or endurance, or both - so that club ride which you 'aren't ready for yet' sounds ideal.

I'm not sure about this at all. Lets say that a rider could go out today and thrash themselves for 120km with 3 - 4 thousand meters of climbing and average between 23 and 24 km/hr which, if they went as hard as they could, would be their current limit. I don't think that they would need to do so much in order to see a training effect, nor would they have to do even more the next time out in order to see any progress.

To my way of thinking what is needed is not to push yourself beyond your current limits each time you go out, but to go hard / long enough to induce sufficient fatigue so that your body needs to recover and so adapt. This effort will probably be a lot less than you could do as a 'one off'. As they say, when it comes training, 'sufficient' is always better than 'more'.

As usual, you are way OTT in terms of trivial over-analysis. Nobody ever said he should go out and batter himself every day. I believe the word I used was 'regularly' - which you appear to be confusing with different words, like 'daily' - which I didn't use.

BenderRodriguez

Stalin wrote:

Re Obree taking 3 or 4 days to recover from an all out turbo effort of 20 or 30 minutes - this is why I'm suspicious of people who claim they can train hard every day and race almost every week.

Obree argues you shouldn't race more than once every 2 weeks...

I think that the main problem here is that, following any given effort, it is so hard to know exactly where you are on the fatigue / recovery / overcompensation / detraining curve. If someone could invent a blood test or something that allowed you to say 'This is the moment to make another training effort' it would make all other recent training innovations look as about as advanced as eating saltfish before a ride to 'Train your resistance to thirst'.

Anyhow, some words from Obree on this issue;

Training, for many people, is a lifestyle choice almost like a hobby in itself. I see this regularly especially among those who tend to always train with groups or clubs where training sessions are usually pre-planned and set to a schedule based on days of the week. This is not the best way to optimise your potential improvement for more than one reason. Firstly, the routine takes no account of your personal recovery from the previous ride. This means that if you’re not fully recovered then you will not be able to ride harder or longer than the last time, so not only will you forgo the opportunity for improvement but you will be tired and therefore set back by a number of days before you can set out for optimum improvement.

…The balance between recovering to the same ability as before or into the zone of improvement is dependent on patience and the confidence to continue in recovery mode. Most cyclists I know usually fear that they have gone past full recovery and that they have entered the phase of losing their condition and as a result set out on another training ride prematurely. The result of this is that because they are not fully recovered they are only able to ride ‘as hard’ as before. Not only does this rob them of the opportunity to reach a new personal level of performance, but if this behaviour continues then the ‘plateau’ syndrome kicks in where no long-term gains are made at all. There is a common syndrome where athletes see a lack of improvement and being work-ethic influenced and focused on training they increase the volume of hard efforts. The net result of this is even worse.

BenderRodriguez

Imposter wrote:

Generally, you improve by regularly pushing yourself beyond your current limits in terms of effort or endurance, or both - so that club ride which you 'aren't ready for yet' sounds ideal.

BenderRodriguez wrote:

I'm not sure about this at all. Lets say that a rider could go out today and thrash themselves for 120km with 3 - 4 thousand meters of climbing and average between 23 and 24 km/hr which, if they went as hard as they could, would be their current limit. I don't think that they would need to do so much in order to see a training effect, nor would they have to do even more the next time out in order to see any progress.

To my way of thinking what is needed is not to push yourself beyond your current limits each time you go out, but to go hard / long enough to induce sufficient fatigue so that your body needs to recover and so adapt. This effort will probably be a lot less than you could do as a 'one off'. As they say, when it comes training, 'sufficient' is always better than 'more'.

Imposter wrote:

As usual, you are way OTT in terms of trivial over-analysis. Nobody ever said he should go out and batter himself every day. I believe the word I used was 'regularly' - which you appear to be confusing with different words, like 'daily' - which I didn't use.

Nor did I! :roll: For example, look at my original post where I said 'The next time out', NOT 'The next day'.

I merely pointed out that to get a training effect there is probably no need to push 'yourself beyond your current limits in terms of effort or endurance, or both', although doing so would probably work, given sufficient recovery between efforts.

'Regular '(define it how you will) 'batterings' probably are one pathway to progress. However, I an not sure that the progress will be greater than if one avoids 'regular' 'batterings' that take days to recover from and instead one makes a greater number of sub-maximal efforts as part of a managed, cumulative training load. As I said, which works best probably depends on the individual - 'YMMV'

Stalin

There is a system you can use to judge exactly when you are recovered enough to train hard again or when you are recovered and fresh enough for a major event.

Those of us who know about these things get considerable entertainment reading utter tosh spouted by the training with power brigade.

And no, I'm not telling what and or how, but coaches in some sports other than cycling, worked all this out decades ago.

Cycling training has been put back decades by the over emphasis on performance enhancing drugs, blood doping, and over the last 10 years or more, power numbers.

Clue, the East Germans and Russians, interviewed and examined their athletes first thing every morning before giving them their training instructions for the day.

I was taught how to do this sort of thing in the early 1980s.

ai_1

Stalin wrote:

There is a system you can use to judge exactly when you are recovered enough to train hard again or when you are recovered and fresh enough for a major event.

Those of us who know about these things get considerable entertainment reading utter tosh spouted by the training with power brigade.

And no, I'm not telling what and or how, but coaches in some sports other than cycling, worked all this out decades ago..........

Well that's enlightening. Thanks for your contribution.

imposter2.0

Stalin wrote:

Clue, the East Germans and Russians, interviewed and examined their athletes first thing every morning before giving them their training instructions for the day.

I was taught how to do this sort of thing in the early 1980s.

You are using the East Germans and Russians as historical examples of training 'best practice'..???

Once again, we see Stalin and this 'bender' guy diverting another reasonable question about general training into their own personal rants about power meters. It's getting silly.