![]() TR doesn’t prescribe them, because if you give people on a mid volume plan a 4+hr ride inside…chances are they won’t do it, and most cyclists with races on the calendar are probably doing long weekend rides anyways. Returns are diminishing after 5-6hrs, so there’s little reason to do long long rides besides getting your ass callused enough, experimenting with nutrition, or if you simply love riding your bike for an entire day. If you’ve done the maths, I was averaging about 10.5 hours a week, with just the Sat having any real intensity. Key for my fitness was that frequent and consistent cycle commute. Outside events I don’t generally go above 6 hours of non stop riding, despite some events being over a number of days with little sleep. But you certainly do not need a vast number of them to develop the fitness. You want some longer rides to get your setup and logistics and the mental side sorted out. I didn’t have any physical problems on those long events (other than some mild nerve damage in hands which is fairly typical for many on the big multi day brevets) Thus missed some of the longer brevets I could have done in build up. Mostly because my bike frame broke, and there was a delay till I managed to borrow a bike, to do the event on. In 2018 also did a 1000km brevet in Scotland off the back of nothing longer than 200km rides. I had 3 weeks off the bike before the event with a couple of weeks walking hut to hut in the French Alps. In other words not many long rides at all, just once a month or so in the 6 months before. Looking at my brevets that year (ahead of the longer one above) I did I would do a 2-3 hour mtn bike blast round local trails on a Sat or Sun morning. I was doing a 45 min road cycle commute twice a day, 5 days a week. If you’ve never successfully fueled a 9+ hour event and show up after only having done a ton of 2 hour rides in training you are likely to have a poor outcome. If you know how to pace and fuel for an all day event then I think you could come in with really consistent but not long-duration efforts and be fine. The nutrition angle of this is the most important thing IMO and is really dependent on your experience level at ultra endurance events. I typically do those exclusively in the form of prep events but of course you could just do a long training ride too. Personally, I find diminishing returns much beyond ~3.5 hour quality rides in training on any kind of regular basis, but I do like to have 1-2 longer 5+ hour rides to practice pacing and nutrition. I don’t want to freak you out because I firmly do not believe you have to do 10 hour rides to have a good Leadville. Until that feature is rolled out you need to employ some self-coaching judgement and consider making alterations to your plan to address more specific demands of your event, including selectively adding volume where appropriate. On a recent podcast, I think (or maybe one of the other hosts) made some remarks of changes coming to Plan Builder that will allow you to further customize your plan for constraints like I can only do the equivalent of low or mid volume on weekdays but I can do longer rides on weekends. That may or may not end up being sufficient. That doesn’t mean you can do Unbound XL on a low volume plan, it means that your plan is going to try and make you as prepared as it can within the constraints you provided it. You could put your A race as Unbound XL on a low volume plan and it will let you. It is attempting to optimize within the constraints you provide it. Plan Builder is not building you a customized plan to ensure preparedness for a specific event. ![]() While I personally have had success at Leadville using low and mid volume plans, I still think people have a fundamental misconception of how Plan Builder works. If you are not used to doing 8-12h rides, there is at the very least utility in doing one or two test rides well before your event or similar duration, to make sure you have your fit and nutrition games down. The downside of this approach is that regular long rides are tiring until your body is used to them (which may take over a year), and recovery from them may interfere with other training sessions that could have been productive to your event performance, if you are not used to doing long rides already. My personal take for what thats worth here is that you certainly can do long events with no specificity training beforehand (no rides of similar duration), but you will not do as well as if you include regular rides of similar duration into your training. One that says you don’t need to do any rides of similar duration in preparation, and one that says you do. When it comes to ultra events (say anything over 8 hours), you tend to have two camps. This is a topic that elicits differing opinions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |