by our mystery "Fit Bit" author - to be revealed in next month's VeloCITY. Or not. Wait and see.
Before I became a cyclist, I was a competitive long distance runner for 11 years, and posted some respectable times. I trained hard, but I also trained smart. Which meant NOT training hard every day. And when it came to coming up with the best workouts, I was a shameless thief, a protocol pirate forever asking “What do you do?” questions to every el/la rapido I raced against. I tried them all, everyone’s favorite workout, turning my body into a clearing house for every imaginable training scheme. Eventually, I tossed out what didn’t work so well, maintained and fine-tuned what did, and boiled everything down to a few core principles that seemed, for me, to work best and, over my final 2 years as a road racer, I recorded personal bests at every distance from 8-K through the marathon.
So, when I bought my first road bike 8 years ago (the first bike I had since I was in the 8th grade), I figured that what worked to make me a stronger, faster runner, I could carry over into my cycling. I did. And it worked. As a result, I’ve gotten stronger and faster each year I’ve ridden. So far. But at my age this perpetually ascending curve is eventually going to flatten out.
Here’s the bottom line: Running and cycling are (obviously; but it still needs to be affirmed) NOT the same activity; running isn’t going to make you a stronger, faster cyclist, and vice versa. But. Many of the same physiological principles and training techniques effectively cross over from one to the other. And here they are.
1. Ride some of your weekly miles (say 10-15+% of your total, certainly not much more than that) harder-to-way harder than your usual, normal moderate pace, your lock-in/auto pilot tempo, the brisk (to you) but mainly comfortable effort you ride almost all the time. Second, ride, say, 20% of your miles slower than this normal pace, even if it means willfully dropping down to a slower group where you HAVE to ride slower, even if it now and then means tripping-over-your-feet slow. This is really when true recovery and rebuilding (of both body and brain) takes place, and when strength gains are actually built——and not during the hard riding when you are actually tearing muscles down. The rest of the time ride your normal pace. Too many riders ride almost the same pace/tempo/effort almost all the time—_this includes almost every Velo-ite——spending anywhere from 90% to 100% in this “Grey Zone” that is neither hard nor easy. The result is stasis because you train your body to do only one thing, and that is ride at THAT pace. Mile after mile after mile.
Instead, try this:
2. Ride long (whatever that is for you) once a week, probably Saturday or Sunday since this is more enjoyably done with a group. From such rides you build/increase ENDURANCE——the ability to ride and ride and ride over longer and longer distances, though at a moderate pace.
3. Ride a good, hard sustained pace (say 6 to 8 minutes) several times during your ride once a week, something that has you breathing hard and your legs getting toasty, but still out of the Red Zone, that is short of anything close to what you’d call squinty-eyed all-out. Think “pleasantly uncomfortable” for these efforts. This kind of interval training produces STAMINA, an increased ability to ride “fairly long, fairly hard.”
4. Finally, once a week (maybe twice, if, as you get stronger, it’s done in conjunction with #3), do some short, but extremely hard efforts that end up being about as red-line as you can ride for 20 seconds to 1 minute. Maybe punch it flat out up a moderate 200-to-300-meter incline. Or come out of the saddle in the big ring and drive as hard as you can for 10 seconds, then sit down and maintain a max effort for another 15 or 20 seconds, or whatever you can manage. Hammer it in the drops for 2 or 3 telephone polls. Get creative. Just make sure that you ARE squinty-eyed and gasping over the final bit. Do this 3 or 4 times during an otherwise normal ride whenever you feel like it, or the terrain serves up an opportunity. It doesn’t take that many reps. What you improve here is muscle STRENGTH, and with it the ability to reach top speed faster and hold it longer, to stand and accelerate on a hill, to sprint.
ENDURANCE. STAMINA. STRENGTH. Improve in these 3 areas, and you cover all the bases. There really isn’t anything else. Do #2-4 above for 6 weeks, and you come out the other end of the pipeline a stronger, faster rider. There is a difference between riding (heading out and turning the cranks however you feel every day) and training (adding some reasonable structure to a few rides each week that is aimed at improving some specific capacity while still keeping your riding fun)
That’s really all there is to it, all you need to do. Oh sure, you can buy training books and CDs and get anal about monitoring heartrate, blahblahblah. And if this makes sense to you, and gives you confidence that you’re doing the right thing, or if you’re one of those people with a compulsive need to quantify everything, then by all means keep doing it. But understand this: riding/training to become a stronger rider isn’t particle physics. If you’re a Tour rider, and hundredths-of-a-second can put you on, or keep you off, the podium, then, yeah, maybe you do want all the lab stuff and computer analysis/feedback and have blood drawn at the summit of every training climb. But for the rest of us, it’s really a pretty simple formula: Ride some of your miles faster to a lot faster than your norm, ride others slower to a lot slower, and just ride however you feel/want to the rest of the time.
It’s worked for me as both runner and cyclist. It may for you, too.
Give it some thought.