Is there any point doing long rides?

supermurph09

Before I start, I will say that I like doing hill climb events and riding hills because I enjoy that discipline, not because I'm going to be pushing Tejvan Pettinger any time soon...

Main goals this year, hill climb events in September and October.

Having missed the traditional winter base building phase (became a father late 2013), I am now approaching some consistency to my cycling. Tuesdays, I am doing long intervals (2miles 6% average, currently 3, progressing to 6), Thursdays, I am doing hill reps (60 seconds, recover, 60 seconds, recover........... building towards 10) and then Saturday/Sunday if I do the club ride it would either be 60+ flat 0r 60 hilly. The club ride is a test, usually with some efforts, flat would be 18-19mph average, hills around 16-17mph average.

But I wonder if I would be better using those 4 hours on the weekend doing something else more hill climbing oriented, or does that longer ride compliment the other 2 sessions nicely and will help overall?

Welcome thoughts on different approaches.

bigpikle

do the club rides and get the mileage. Doing more intervals all the way to Sept/Oct will totally burn you out anyway and I'd bet a lot of money you never made it that long anyway. Twice a week of decent intervals would be plenty with other miles.

Work on quality on those intervals though and really push on. 10 x 60sec on/off isnt much really. Try building to 2 sets of 7 full gas 60 sec on/off reps and really hit them hard

meanredspider

I'm a great exponent of the long, slow ride. I believe that, for training, you should either be pushing really hard (intervals, hill repeats) or very long and slow. I think slow rides, that build your fat burning adaptation whilst not digging too deep into your glycogen reserves, are way under-rated. It's working really well for me.

bahzob

IMO long rides are a waste of time from training POV unless
- You have unlimited time to train
- You are training for a long distance event
- The ride includes an element of competition that forces you to work harder on short intervals than you can manage solo.
>> Ofc that does not mean they are not worth doing. They can be fun/social. Just no good for training.

I speak as one for whom all the above actually apply. So I spent large portions of last winter doing endurance rides. I now consider this to be largely a waste of time. I get much better results training on a mixture of shorter intervals coupled with hard 1-2 hour sessions at sweet-spot and short 60 minute active recovery at very low W.

One particular issue I have is mentioned above. The only actual benefit LSD has in terms of performance is a supposed improvement in terms of fat burning. However I know of no way that an athlete can monitor their level of fat burning. Even if you have a full lab at your disposal this is hit and miss. I now far rather measure my threshold and sustainable power at 2-4 hours. This is easy to monitor and much more reliable in terms of an event predictor. And the best way to increase these for me at least is skip LSD. If you are doing hill climbs I would suspect it would apply even more.

supermurph09

Some great points and I guess as always what suits one may not suit another.

Big Pickle: "Work on quality on those intervals though and really push on. 10 x 60sec on/off isnt much really. Try building to 2 sets of 7 full gas 60 sec on/off reps and really hit them hard". I will hope to build to that, I just need to ensure that on the first one or two I don't complete empty the tanks, as happened last week.

meanredspider

bahzob wrote:

However I know of no way that an athlete can monitor their level of fat burning. Even if you have a full lab at your disposal this is hit and miss.

I don't understand this point - can you explain some more? It seems to imply that if you can't measure it directly, it isn't worth doing. That seems to be a bit of a fallacy.

iron-clover

I think the longer rides help you to build up stamina and endurance. I started off doing big miles when I started cycling and put the speed on later. I particularly like long lumpy rides to keep my endurance up, although admittedly I don't have the time at the moment to be able to put those rides in, but by summer I plan on going again.

That and doing a big loop to the seaside/ famous town on a bright summer's day is one of the best things I can think of doing on a bike!

The big miles don't seem to help me in the shorter events, like 10 mile TTs, but it makes a huge difference in a 50 mile road race with a climb every 8 miles. I might not be able to pull or sprint as hard as the strong men, but by the end only about 1/3 of the field is normally left in the pack after being whittled away.

meanredspider

Yes - I've found that I'm able to maintain power for much longer. If before I was able to produce xW of power for 1 hour I'm now pleasantly surprised that I can deliver it for 2 hours and more

DeVlaeminck

Depends what is meant by a long ride. I don't think doing loads of miles at an easy pace will make you fast but long rides at a sustained pace helps so long as that's not all you do. Plenty of people credit training camps where they do maybe 500 miles in the week a useful part of their season build up. A mate who went from 4th to 2nd cat last season reckons the Tour of Wessex and the week of the Marmotte (we did a lot of riding as well as the event) were key step changes in his fitness during the season.

BenderRodriguez

This is what Michael Hutchinson has to say about long rides and fat burning in his new book Faster.

It doesn't take a Nobel Prize winning physiologist to spot that if you can find a way to use more fat, you'll use less carbohydrates. Endurance training increases the amount of fat used at any given sub-maximal that level - in fact it can more than double it.

This is why professional bike riders spend their winters packing in the long rides. Five, six, seven hours of grinding, tapping, rolling or trundling, depending on the outlook of the ride in question. Usually done from home even by the stars because the off-season is really the only chance an elite rider gets to stay in one place for more than a few nights, and to see their family. For riders based in northern Europe that often means being on a bike for almost all the hours of winter daylight. The long rides shift the rider firmly into the zone where fat burning is the main fuel source, and the muscles and enzymes adapt to it

It's easy to assume that the long rides aren't necessary - it's not all that hard to get a lot of the aerobic adaptations in the oxygen moving system from relatively short training sessions. But if you a pro who has to race for five or six hours a day why they still, very traditionally, garden grind out the miles, their answer is simply that this is how they stop themselves from falling apart at the end of a long events.

This doesn't mean that people like me haven't gone looking for shortcuts. I'm particularly keen to find one for two reasons I've never been great at the fat burning game and these days, as I retreat from full-time riding, I just don't have the time to spare. The idea of the fasted ride is an old one - get up skip breakfast, put plain water in your bottle, and crank out three or four hours. You try to do it at a place that doesn't involve bonking, but if you are a powerful rider with a high-energy turnover, you'll fail quite a lot of the time. This does help with the fat burning adaptation because, as with the pros long rides, you're in fat burning territory for quite a long time. The problem is that you're quite probably in protein-burning, eating-your-own-legs territory as well. The same dangers apply to all the alternative strategy of stringing together several days of long rides and little carbohydrate.

The current attempt to square this circle is to fuel the three or - four - hour ride using a mix of protein and a small amount of carbohydrate, and maybe some coconut oil in attempt to keep yourself in an anabolic state (building muscle) rather than a catabolic one (tearing it down) while keeping carbohydrate availability low. The protein hopefully means that even if your body starts to demand significant amounts of that as a fuel, at least it's not using muscle. The carbohydrate and the coconut oil should stave off the bonk-royale. It's not a pleasant session you feel like you're hovering on the edge of the abyss for most of it. At least it seems to sort of work, if the lab scores are anything to go by, but it is not as good as the proper long stuff

meanredspider

I just do the 6-hour rides rather than try to cut corners. If you get up early enough you can be done by lunchtime and it feels good to have done a century and still have most of the afternoon left. I've relied more on these than I have interval training etc and yet I can still hold my own on shorter rides (I'm just back from a ride with a quick friend and we did a couple of 4-5 minute segments which I comfortably beat him at). Because it works for me, it might not work for you but I'm very happy with the results.

BenderRodriguez

This paper also makes some relevant points:

https://secure.footprint.net/gatorade/s ... ar_SSE.pdf

For example:

Every time muscles contract, calcium is released from an intracellular store. Therefore, when cycling at a cadence of 100 rpm, this means that muscles are releasing calcium 100 times every minute. While the majority of that calcium is used to initiate contraction, some of it activates a family of calcium-binding proteins that are important in the adaptation to endurance training. One of these calcium-binding proteins is an enzyme called calcium/calmodulin-activated kinase II (CaMKII). CaMKII is a powerful activator of PGC-1α transcription. Therefore, calcium release increases the amount of PGC-1α in part by activating CaMKII. Since the amount of calcium released in a contracting skeletal muscle fiber generally doesn’t change from contraction to contraction, the only way to increase the effects of calcium is to train that muscle fiber longer. This is the molecular rationale behind the idea of long slow training. The longer an athlete is on the bike, in the pool, running, etc., the longer the calcium levels will be high in his muscle fibers and the more PGC-1α transcription will occur. When this type of long slow training is started, slower fibers (type I) and small groups of faster fibers (type II) are used. As work continues, glycogen in these fibers decreases and larger groups of fast muscle fibers must be used. Therefore, near the end of a long training bout, calcium release will occur in the larger motor units, providing the signal to increase mitochondria and blood vessels in these muscle fibers and improve the power/velocity at lactate threshold.

indjke

DeVlaeminck wrote:

Plenty of people credit training camps where they do maybe 500 miles in the week a useful part of their season build up.

In the first decade of April I've got a such camp for the first time in my life.

Not to mention in was after six months of inactivity (I wasn't riding neither outdoors nor on trainers since September).

So... After collecting 36 hrs / 550 miles / 39.000 feet elevation in eight days and doing almost no special work (intervals), I have now the same HR/power (real power, measured by Quarq) relation and max 20 min power like in the July/August of prevoius year, at the peak of season!