I can’t help but notice that some AGers are doing tons of long rides months before their IM. Whereas some of the top AGers I know sprinkle a few (3-4) in during the last 8 weeks but are smashing the 2-3 hr rides 8+ weeks out. So I’m wondering why the long rides 8+ weeks out from your big race. For example, I can get more TSS riding 10 hrs a week vs 10 hrs a week which includes 5-6hr ride.
im not sure about IM distance…but speed work on the bike is underrated even for 70.3 distance, atleast for myself.
This is my point…getting more fit on the bike is underrated. It seems the “cool” thing to do is ride 5+ hrs. Sure you need to practice the distance with nutrition but you can do this with 3-4 longer rides.
Going out for a long ride with your mates on a nice day is fun. Screw TSS.
This is my point…getting more fit on the bike is underrated. It seems the “cool” thing to do is ride 5+ hrs. Sure you need to practice the distance with nutrition but you can do this with 3-4 longer rides.
For a lot of AGers, think it may be largely a function of being able to get in volume given time constraints of weekly schedules.
If you put in 10 hours total (at say… 2, 3, 4, and 1 hour sessions) or 10 hours at (2, 2 and 6)… that’s one less day you have to fit in a bike workout. May not be “right” but that’s how people do it.
Anyway - hard to assess taken in isolation…and in comparison with top AGers. How much/how often are you running and swimming? Top AGers, for the most part, are training all year, year in and year out. So their volume is always there.
im not sure about IM distance…but speed work on the bike is underrated even for 70.3 distance, atleast for myself.
This was my biggest learning from my first IM. The distance was no problem, I set my highest power numbers in the last 45km of the bike and ran well (for me anyway). I was really worried about being able to go long and sacrificed some speed because of it. Never again!
Going out for a long ride with your mates on a nice day is fun. Screw TSS.
It’s the same thing with long runs and long swims. For some reason most age groupers have this misguided view that the best way to get phyiologically stronger is to replicate or get close to the max distance of their race legs. More important is overall weekly training load and recovery. There are way superior ways to get to better physiology especially for time limited age groupers than individual long workouts. Much better to get to weekly high hours at aggregate higher intensity across days through many shorter to moderate higher intensity workouts. These also work better around family and work life. No need to carve out massive blocks of time. Also my observation is that shorter workouts, blood sugar and other hormones through the rest of the day stay way more stable resulting in better overall body composition over time.
i feel that the really long ride has two primary uses for triathletes:
1, it’s a good way of getting a huge amount of basic work on your aerobic plumbing, if you need it. it carries a far lower injury risk than long runs, and - at least for me - a 5-hour swim is impossible and unnecessary. depending on your background and level of fitness, this kind of work on your base can really pay off. i find that as people get fitter and more experienced, blunt LSD work doesn’t have as much value (or anyway, they’re getting diminishing returns) compared to sharper speed/threshold work.
2, it’s an opportunity to shake down and practice. you can dial in your clothing, nutrition, position, bike, etc., in a low-risk way. that way you’re not surprised on race day when you find you can’t stomach any gel at hour 4, or get a blister from those shoes or chafing from that top. the best way to learn this stuff, i think, is through first-hand experience and that’s invaluable knowledge to have on race day. as trivial as it might seem, a bad blister can really shut down a race.
-mike
Going out for a long ride with your mates on a nice day is fun. Screw TSS.
It’s the same thing with long runs and long swims. For some reason most age groupers have this misguided view that the best way to get phyiologically stronger is to replicate or get close to the max distance of their race legs. More important is overall weekly training load and recovery. There are way superior ways to get to better physiology especially for time limited age groupers than individual long workouts. Much better to get to weekly high hours at aggregate higher intensity across days through many shorter to moderate higher intensity workouts. These also work better around family and work life. No need to carve out massive blocks of time. Also my observation is that shorter workouts, blood sugar and other hormones through the rest of the day stay way more stable resulting in better overall body composition over time.
You can also be more consistent as well. The long rides and runs take a lot of you the next few days. And your going to rack up a lot of fatigue going into the IM.
I just got 2 rides this weekend for a total of 5.5 hrs with an average IF of 0.84. It would be a lot harder to do this on one 5.5 hr ride and it would take way longer to recover from.
Uh, if I wanted to be good at riding a bike for 112 miles I’d do long rides to get good at that. Yeah, power is important too but seems like IM requires training both.
PS, just because your training plan has a certain schedule doesn’t mean its the only or best way to do things.
Uh, if I wanted to be good at riding a bike for 112 miles I’d do long rides to get good at that. Yeah, power is important too but seems like IM requires training both.
PS, just because your training plan has a certain schedule doesn’t mean its the only or best way to do things.
Yeah, but we don’t have to practice a race simulation every weekend to get good at doing the distance on race day. Getting physiologically stronger trumps race simulations. Plenty of young pro athletes with big engines kick the ass of lots of old age groupers who have way more lifetime long rides under their belts, even though the age grouper with 20 years of experience has practiced what he will do in racing way more times. Just having a bigger physiology helps more. So when it comes to prep at the individual scale, I would prioritize what makes the athlete stronger over getting race simulation experience and the reality is that most of the long rides and runs people do, with drafting, coasting, stops, stretching breaks and other disruptions don’t even resemble what they will do on race day. A hard 3.5 hour ride in the aerobars at harder than IM race pace with no stops and no drafting is much more race specific anyway, than the 100 miler draft fest with 20 friends, 4 starbucks stops, multiple pee breaks and multiple flat repair breaks that takes 7 hours. The latter has no resemblance to racing. The former is closer to what one will do on race day, but on race day, the only delta is dialing down the intensity and doing it for a bit longer, totally supported by aid stations.
The primary race simulation is probably going at a solid pace with no stops, no drafting on the bike, in the aerobars on the bike. On the run, its just a steady even paced effort with the back third or quarter approaching long race perceived exertion (you’ll be going faster than race day in an IM, but that’s fine). Just sharing the counter angle here, because I see so many wasted long rides and long runs that families hate and leaves people hammered for work productivity on Monday (thus employers implicitly hate them too).
A hard 3.5 hour ride in the aerobars at harder than IM race pace with no stops and no drafting is much more race specific anyway, than the 100 miler draft fest with 20 friends, 4 starbucks stops, multiple pee breaks and multiple flat repair breaks that takes 7 hours. The latter has no resemblance to racing.
People might be going out on these long rides because they need to spend a long time on the bike getting out to the roads that allow your example 3.5 hour workout to happen uninterrupted in the first place. For example, I’ve started to enjoy long trips on Highway 1 south from SF towards Santa Cruz, but it’s 1h15m of stoplights, climbs, and descents before reaching Montara, where the road really opens up.
Long group rides are a completely different problem. I always find myself disappointed when looking at the ride files from group rides. 40% Z1 with an enormous amount of that simply not pedaling, tons of time at either Z3 or Z5 yet less time than if I specifically targeted the zones, and lots of fatigue.
Uh, if I wanted to be good at riding a bike for 112 miles I’d do long rides to get good at that. Yeah, power is important too but seems like IM requires training both.
PS, just because your training plan has a certain schedule doesn’t mean its the only or best way to do things.
Yeah, but we don’t have to practice a race simulation every weekend to get good at doing the distance on race day. Getting physiologically stronger trumps race simulations. Plenty of young pro athletes with big engines kick the ass of lots of old age groupers who have way more lifetime long rides under their belts, even though the age grouper with 20 years of experience has practiced what he will do in racing way more times. Just having a bigger physiology helps more. So when it comes to prep at the individual scale, I would prioritize what makes the athlete stronger over getting race simulation experience and the reality is that most of the long rides and runs people do, with drafting, coasting, stops, stretching breaks and other disruptions don’t even resemble what they will do on race day. A hard 3.5 hour ride in the aerobars at harder than IM race pace with no stops and no drafting is much more race specific anyway, than the 100 miler draft fest with 20 friends, 4 starbucks stops, multiple pee breaks and multiple flat repair breaks that takes 7 hours. The latter has no resemblance to racing. The former is closer to what one will do on race day, but on race day, the only delta is dialing down the intensity and doing it for a bit longer, totally supported by aid stations.
The primary race simulation is probably going at a solid pace with no stops, no drafting on the bike, in the aerobars on the bike. On the run, its just a steady even paced effort with the back third or quarter approaching long race perceived exertion (you’ll be going faster than race day in an IM, but that’s fine). Just sharing the counter angle here, because I see so many wasted long rides and long runs that families hate and leaves people hammered for work productivity on Monday (thus employers implicitly hate them too).
?? Are we answering the same question? The OP inquired about 5-6 hour rides on a regular basis and no where did I suggest 7 hour coffee rides were helpful in boosting race fitness (although they do have their place in mental health).
A strong IM bike requires A)the ability to ride for a long time B)the ability to ride fast. Practice both.
…some of the top AGers I know sprinkle a few (3-4) in during the last 8 weeks but are smashing the 2-3 hr rides 8+ weeks out. So I’m wondering why the long rides 8+ weeks out from your big race.
I’ll play the other side of the question: why “smash” 2-3 hours? Why not just 1 hour at FTP? Or 20 minutes at 105-110% of FTP. The reason is that all sport performance is training specific. If you want to be good at riding 112 miles, pretty fast, and coming off feeling pretty fresh, you need to train for that exact activity. Which means building up to 112 miles, riding pretty hard, at a relatively constant pace.
There is a complication in this, which is that for most age group athletes, we are time constrained. If you are only going to get in 10 total hours on the bike each week, 5 hours is likely just too much for a single session; you won’t recover quickly enough. So, what do you do? You compromise and smash 2-3 hours, and hope that is good enough come race day.
If you are training for IM distance, I’d say that root problem is only 10 hours a week on the bike. With that time limit, neither choice (2-3 hours hard, or 5 hours single session) is ideal; both are a compromise. In which case, take the path that gives you the most mental confidence going into the race.
This is one of those quality vs quantity questions. Not sure if i would qualify as a “top AGers.” Different athletes will respond differently to stimulus. I do a good amount of 100 plus mile rides 2-3 months out from a IM and 30-45 days out I start knocking out specific 2-3 hours rides. I just did 2 100 mile plus rides past 3 weeks and I am getting ready for Oct IM. You can’t replace volume.
Yep. I’ve matched the TSS of 100 mile rides doing less than 80, but hillier/harder. That’s certainly one effective way of skinning the cat.
Another perspective on long rides.
I don’t race and I only cycle, but one of the reasons I started doing longer rides was that I needed an attitude adjustment. I still count my indoor training as my “meat and potatoes” for changing sustainable power output with shorter intervals and sessions no more than 90 minutes. However, on Saturdays, weather permitting, I started doing 4 to 5 hour rides a few years ago not because it was good training, but because I had a crappy attitude about saddle time with a route 60+ miles.
While I really enjoyed routes up to 60 miles I found that just after mark I would get a thought like, “okay I am done with this and I am ready to be done.” The moment I had this thought my performance would drop off significantly because of my attitude. So I figured I needed an attitude change and I was also uncomfortable past 60 miles with the aero position and neck issues. After a few months of an 80 mile route and telling myself I loved it I noticed that I got hooked on it. When I started liking it my performance beyond the 60 mile mark improved. I believe the fitness was always there, but the change in attitude changed my focus and I sustained the power all the way to the end. Then I started stretching it out to 100 miles on Saturdays and found myself thinking in the last mile that I hate that the ride is ending. Also I became more comfortable staying in the aero position for 95% of the rides. My personal rules on these training rides were keep pedaling (don’t coast) and only stop for quick nature breaks.
It was more of a bad attitude and saddle comfort issue beyond the 3 hour mark that needed to be changed. Once my attitude changed from “dread it” to “love it” my performance from start to finish improved. Again the fitness was there, but once my mind was ready to quit the body was ready quit as well. I needed a mindset that is willing to push the body all the way through.
This! 100% agree. For me its been that way with the 5 hour mark. Nothing replaces time in the saddle. Just feel like people want to find a way of getting out of the 5+ hours ride. You want to race long and be good at it you need to train long on the bike. Body has to get used to the 5+ hours. When I started getting used to 5 hour rides in training those 4 hours rides suddenly started feeling much easier and now when I am in those last few mile of a IM bike i don’t have that “please get me off the bike now” feeling.
For me my long slow rides got a lot less boring when I changed from just a long ride with the same low intensity to a long ride with hour- intervals with a higher intensity.
This higher intensity is still lower than IM- intensity though lets say 10 heartbeats.
At the moment I do two hour- intervals in a four hour session. I record the average speed, do always the same course and I like it because I see my improvements.
Last year I had a session with four hour- intervals where the last one still went ok. I knew I was fir for an IM then.
I do at least 20 long slow rides in the 6 months before an IM. I can handle that and do just not dare to do less. I think the long slow rides are the perfect training for the marathon, because you get less tired off your bike.
And o yeah: I do the intervals in aeroposition.
I don’t think TSS tells the whole story. TP is a great guide a tool but its not the end all be all.