This. And on the other end, when I wanted to sharpen fitness, I'd destroy myself on group rides.

'This' what? Quote vs Reply, one is simple to follow and the other requires you to scroll back through countless posts to figure out what you're on about.

I guess you’ll have to use your imagination or ingenuity.

^^^ This. Even Van der Poel, racing and crushing the field, went back to training so he could get more fitness. No matter what one thinks, group rides will not get you faster.

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Kiwami Racing Team

Aside from this. They're doing far less than 80-90 days a year now. Maybe in the 80's-90's? Lemond really flipped the table over when it came to season planning by focusing on the Tour. This is the norm these days, apart from maybe Pog. More than anything, these guys generally spend about 50-60 days a year at altitude training and doing.... wait for it..... intervals.

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Heath Dotson
HD Coaching:Website |Twitter: 140 Characters or Less|Facebook:Follow us on Facebook

maybe, but the skill of drafting in a tight fast pack can be easily lost with mostly solo training. I think zwift/rouvy should make a change to their drafting algo that completely takes off the tension when you are riding behind some body - so you can't grind pedal through other people

The skill of holding a wheel at speed and maintaining a good position in the pack is vital for any racing and is easily lost unless you do a group ride regularly.

I've been on many good and bad rides. The bad ones were where people were obsessed with not getting dropped, never took any risks and aspired to be MOP wheel followers. Attacking after a sprint point was a favorite tactic.

The good ones had a good warmup and a couple of regroup points. People pushed their limits and got dropped but knew they had a chance to get back on. Usually you'd end up in a group of 8 or 10 doing a double rotating paceline for for 50 mins or so. You'd be chasing another group or holding off chasers. Only way to go fast was working with others to go as fast as possible. Great for improving timing, riding efficiently, working the top end and figuring you how to recover while in the red. Some of the best training you can do.

No intervals worked for Eddy Merckx.

But that guy raced in the 60s and 70s, and our understanding of performance has progressed.

In my 2022 rides, where I had a power meter, my group rides tended to be a lot of time at low power (endurance ish pace), and maybe 20-30 minutes at or above threshold. That’s not quite enough to build time to exhaustion around threshold. In contrast, the club’s faster ride would have had me probably riding at tempo pace in the bunch, and then going way over threshold in the 30 seconds I was able to stay at the front.

Everyone’s zone distribution is going to vary depending on them and the group, and their response to training is also going to vary. The point is my group rides weren’t productive for me in 2022. In 2023, I specifically worked on TTE. But I also dropped my power meter, so I don’t know exactly how hard I was working at the front - I think I was probably around tempo pace most of the time if I was on the front (for the faster group, I just tried to hang on for dear life and I would spend maybe 2-3 minutes at the front at most).

I think it’s illustrative to read Joe Parkins account of learning the ropes as a young professional in Belgium. Their training was lots of miles, mostly easy, mostly flat. Occasionally the side by side team rides would force thresholdy efforts, though no one called them that. And they raced, a lot. Eventually Parkin returned to the us and raced mountain bikes. He participated in an Olympic camp in 96 and had the revelation of pre season intervals with a hr monitor.

Intervals have been around in cycling since at least the a 80s. Further back in running. There will always be people who succeed without intervals. There’s no replacing talent, or a professional’s calendar. But for the rest of us intervals probably help.

Is that what used to (~20 years ago is the last time I rode it...) be called the "muddy ride" in San Jose on Santa Teresa Blvd?

A bit further north; the PenVelo ride from the reservoir at Canada/92. Lots of great local rides all over South Bay. There is the famous noon ride, but I've never even thought of trying that one (too many pros).

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
Depression, Neurocognitive problems, Dementias (Testing and Evaluation), Trauma and PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

We were talking about this video on a run last night. A lot more questions than answers but a lot of insight too. Some things that were brought up:

-It's not that 'no intervals' is ineffective, it's that it *could be* less effective than structured intervals. This is nearly impossible to measure tho, as group rides and intuitive training are not easily replicable. A very good rider doing 95% effective training will still find himself at or near the front of the pack.

-The point of doing intervals is to control the specificity of training. A world tour cyclist almost by definition has a good intuition of what training should be to compete in world tour races. "Doing Madone 3 times kinda hard" may not be called interval training, but a power graph of that ride and 3x40min @85%FTP are practically the same.

-Very probably, for a top tier cyclist, it's going to be likelier they to go too hard than too easy. Interval are a tried and true way to control this.

-Group rides frequented by a bunch of triathletes on Slowtwitch are not a good representation of group rides on World Tour teams. World Tour racers will know how a World Tour race goes, and one should reason that their group rides by and large reflect this racing.

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