Endurance: am I cooked?

badgerbeaver

My question is about whether my endurance level is where it should be, and suggestions for improvement.

I am pretty much following British Cycling sportive training plan with a view to a big one in July.

Tuesday - cross training in the evening
Wednesday - spinning (intervals)
Thursday - spinning (intervals), cross training in the evening
Sunday - club ride / solo ride

Did a solo ride at the weekend, 130km+ and felt knackered after 4 hours. Certainly in no shape to tackle a 2 hour alpine climb.
Perhaps I was not eating enough (2 energy bars, egg roll, one gel).
Perhaps I went off too hard (average heart rate was well into Zone 3, most of the short climbs of less than five minutes tackled in Zone 4 or 5)
Perhaps I am just not fit enough and there is a hell of a lot more work to do in the next 12 weeks.
or
Does everyone feel like that after a hard ride of 4 hours? For the sportive should I be thinking that I will be dialling it down a bit?

meanredspider

My advice would be to look to do the distance but go steady. I don't think you're achieving anything more by trying to go hard - the short stuff will bring up your aerobic capability. Looking to build endurance is all about saddle time in my experience. As for eating, I don't think what you ate was too bad - probably a bit less than I eat on a flat if windy century. Making sure you're fuelled up before you go is important though. And pacing yourself is important too - a friend suggests that 1 minute at the start is worth 3 minutes at the end. Certainly if you blow your legs early, you'll pay for it later: tortoise not hare.

supermurph09

So from the above, you only ride your bike 1 day a week?

DeVlaeminck

What is the goal?

My advice would be forget about zones, ditch the energy food, ditch the intervals, ditch the spin bike, ditch the training plan.

Spend all the time you spend in the gym and travelling to and from it on the bike riding relatively hard, if there are some challenging midweek training rides in your area join them or find a few training partners to add a bit of competition, if not pick a hilly route and hammer it at least twice a week keeping a time for motivation. On your club ride make do with water and real food (bananas are fine), go with a group that you find challenging.

You could get race fit in 4 sessions a week, but 95% of doing that is simply riding your bike hard. There is a place for structure, zones, turbos and even off the bike exercises but for a lot of novices they get in the way of spending time in the saddle and learning to push themselves. Magazines sell by giving their readers magic sessions to get fit but the old adage of the most important three things being ride your bike ride your bike ride your bike still holds true.

marcusjb

Totally.

Just ride. As much as you can.

Very few of us need to follow strict training plans, unless we are competing at a reasonably high level. To complete a sportive, just enjoy riding your bike - don't think of 'training'. Now the evenings are light, get a couple of rides in during the week - make them harder and faster. Weekend, do a longer ride. That is about as advanced a training plan as I would aim for - maybe one of the evening sessions do hill repeats - but don't make it any more complex than it needs to be.

I would definitely agree that too many people get bogged down in training plans that are just overly complex for anyone not competing at a decent level.

badgerbeaver

DeVlaeminck wrote:

What is the goal?

My advice would be forget about zones, ditch the energy food, ditch the intervals, ditch the spin bike, ditch the training plan.

Spend all the time you spend in the gym and travelling to and from it on the bike riding relatively hard, if there are some challenging midweek training rides in your area join them or find a few training partners to add a bit of competition, if not pick a hilly route and hammer it at least twice a week keeping a time for motivation. On your club ride make do with water and real food (bananas are fine), go with a group that you find challenging.

You could get race fit in 4 sessions a week, but 95% of doing that is simply riding your bike hard. There is a place for structure, zones, turbos and even off the bike exercises but for a lot of novices they get in the way of spending time in the saddle and learning to push themselves. Magazines sell by giving their readers magic sessions to get fit but the old adage of the most important three things being ride your bike ride your bike ride your bike still holds true.

Totally understand your point. I used to ride to and from work sometimes three or four times a week (45 minutes each way), so I used to get my fix that way. Now we live 50 miles away I have to take the train and practicality and schedules dictate that I can't ride my bike during the week. With the summer evenings coming, this will change and I potentially can put in an hour or two at a push, but not for a good few weeks to come. I'd much rather be on the bike in daylight, than in a gym at night time.

Thanks also for the pointer on saddle time, putting in the hours, I assume, at a lower intensity. To some extent I can get this from my club ride (they do like a tea stop though, so I don't think of it as "training" per se - maybe I should).

JayKosta

Do make sure you've had enough to eat before starting - dried fruit, fig bars, bread & jam, etc. It should be food that digests fairly quickly.
Also use an energy drink that contains carbs to supplement what you eat. Plain water is fine if you are eating enough solid food while riding. On a long longer than about 3 hours, try to consume about 200-250 calories per hour, and get some protein also.

Jay Kosta
Endwell NY USA

Barbarossa

130km in 4 hours is pretty good going!

Garry H

Barbarossa wrote:

130km in 4 hours is pretty good going!

That's what I thought. On course for a proper hundred in less than five hours.

meanredspider

I read it slightly differently - I thought the OP meant that at 4 hours into his 130+ km ride he felt knackered.

badgerbeaver

meanredspider wrote:

I read it slightly differently - I thought the OP meant that at 4 hours into his 130+ km ride he felt knackered.

You're right. After 4 hours I had done about 109km of the ride and at that point I felt pretty bad. I took a further 55 minutes to finish the ride at around 138km, on rolling roads with enough little ramps to make me feel the burn in my legs and be humbled by the headwind.

As a benchmark my best time for 100m was the super fast RideLondon and that was 5 1/2 hours, even with the cakes and chatting, But that was FLAT and pretty easy going. When I ride solo on rolling stuff it's at around 27kmh and a couple of clicks more when I ride with my club.

I'm worried about the training I am doing now as I don't know if I am executing it wrong, or have the wrong expectations of who it should feel at this point relative to how hard I am working.

So from the advice I see here on Friday I should go out, well rested and fed, with plenty of water and an energy bar or equivalent for each hour of riding, go at a steady pace and not bury myself, especially earlier on and hopefully finish in better shape.

I could do the same ride as last week, and test the difference, or I could go for much longer and put more work in and teach the body to stay in the saddle for longer.
I can ride again on Saturday morning for a couple of hours (spin? tempo? intervals?)

Team4Luke

too much none cycling

sheffsimon

BadgerBeaver wrote:

meanredspider wrote:

I read it slightly differently - I thought the OP meant that at 4 hours into his 130+ km ride he felt knackered.

You're right. After 4 hours I had done about 109km of the ride and at that point I felt pretty bad. I took a further 55 minutes to finish the ride at around 138km, on rolling roads with enough little ramps to make me feel the burn in my legs and be humbled by the headwind.

As a benchmark my best time for 100m was the super fast RideLondon and that was 5 1/2 hours, even with the cakes and chatting, But that was FLAT and pretty easy going. When I ride solo on rolling stuff it's at around 27kmh and a couple of clicks more when I ride with my club.

I'm worried about the training I am doing now as I don't know if I am executing it wrong, or have the wrong expectations of who it should feel at this point relative to how hard I am working.

So from the advice I see here on Friday I should go out, well rested and fed, with plenty of water and an energy bar or equivalent for each hour of riding, go at a steady pace and not bury myself, especially earlier on and hopefully finish in better shape.

I could do the same ride as last week, and test the difference, or I could go for much longer and put more work in and teach the body to stay in the saddle for longer.
I can ride again on Saturday morning for a couple of hours (spin? tempo? intervals?)

Just go out and ride hard for a couple of hours, dont over-analyse it.

DeVlaeminck

Exactly, there's a common theme in most of these posts, people think too much!

meanredspider

I do think he can be a bit smarter than just going to ride. I'd be recommending just two types of ride:

- fast, short and hard
- slow, long and easy

And as many of the latter as possible. But any proper riding will help.

bahzob

As above I would suggest trying to spend as much time on a real bike as possible.

Also I am not familiar with the training plan you are following. I can however highly recommend the Time Crunched Cyclist book. It costs less than £7 as an ebook and contains all the information needed to train for a variety of events including sportives.

It scores because it is aimed at folk like you who have little time to spend training and comes with a variety of very easy to follow 12 week plans a couple of which would be perfect for you. The latest edition also includes sections on training while commuting.

If you were following this I suspect you may be improving more. And if you had issues you could be far more focussed in terms of identifying what these were and get help in places like this.

badgerbeaver

For the avoidance of doubt I am following the British Cycling Training plans, Intermediate level and am on week 15. The aim is to go back to the Alps this summer, fitter and stronger than the last time I visited in 2013.

The British Cycling plans (in the Insight Zone for members that are interested) generally suggest 3 sessions of cycling a week, and 2 non-cycling sessions, often labelled as "bonus sessions".

The Wednesday session is a short cycling session marked Road/turbo/rollers/wattbike - this is the only one where I can't ride (I get home too late to go out on the road for 1.5 hours).

The other two sessions are on a Saturday and Sunday, which I can do on the road.

For the longer ride at the weekend, did 153km in 5:47, with the first hour seeing 28km and the last hour only 24km. I ran out of food after three hours and was ravenously hungry for the last couple of hours.

The shorter ride at the weekend was 64km in 2:17, so about 28kmh average, and was very comfortable for me.

Looking at the stats on Strava and on my Garmin, looks like I am not staying in the right heart rate zones for the prescribed training on the road, i.e. I am pushing too hard for too long, too early in the ride. This is probably down to me paying too much attention to the "average speed" display on my Garmin, and driven by a Strava-induced anxiety I have for "going faster", as opposed to my actual riding and heart rate. I will be removing this from the display for my next few rides and see what happens! I think I will also set little alarms for heart rate zones once I figure out how.

Really appreciate the advice here, and have ordered the book suggested by many here. In the meantime, I will pick on the advice to

pace myself - which inevitably means I will spend longer on the bike
fuel - make sure I set off fuelled up, and with enough fuel for the ride