With a little more than seven weeks to go before the end of the year, I have to ride another 750 miles in order to achieve my goal of having 20,000 miles on the bike. I’ll reach that goal, but I’ll admit that my motivation to do so has waned.
The primary reason I ride my bike is because I enjoy it. More to the point, I enjoy setting long-term goals that force me to push my comfort zones–stretch to accomplish them. In the context of bicycling, meeting those goals requires that I develop a training schedule and stick to it, improving my fitness and endurance a little at a time so that I’m prepared when the big event comes. The training invariably involves riding a lot of miles, but the miles aren’t the point: they’re a byproduct of the training.
Just “putting in the miles” is not effective training. Doing long slow rides every day does very little in terms of increasing fitness. It’s pointless exercise. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not going to increase my speed, build my ability to climb or sprint, or even make a difference in how far I can ride. If I just want to get up and move, I’ll take Charlie for a walk. Long slow distance is boring and pointless.
Bicycle training (and other types of physical training) involves three types of workouts: base, overload, and recovery. All three types have specific purposes.
In bicycle training, base mileage workouts are designed to build endurance, get you accustomed to spending hours in the saddle, learning how to measure your effort so that you can maintain a strong pace throughout the distance. These rides are long steady distance, but also involve some high-heart rate efforts (climbing, for example) and periods of rest and recovery on the bike (after a hard effort). Base mileage is the foundation. It builds endurance and gives you a foundation on which you can build strength and speed.
Note that I said long steady distance rather than long slow distance. The difference is that base mileage workouts are not necessarily (or even often) slow. Most LSD rides are done at a medium aerobic effort, with some forays into high aerobic effort. More infrequently, I’ll do an LSD ride at high effort and throw in some sprints or hill that push me into anaerobic territory. “Slow” doesn’t usually enter into the equation. I’m tired when I’m done with an LSD ride, but not completely exhausted.
“Overload” rides usually involve a lot of sprints and hill repeats, or a time trial that I ride as fast as possible. These workouts are designed to push my body further than I’ve pushed it before. I want to climb a larger hill, sprint faster, complete the time trial in less time. When I’m done with one of these rides, I’m beat. My legs are shaking, and climbing the stairs to the office is difficult. These hard efforts “tear down” the muscles in my legs so that they can be rebuilt stronger. Pushing my heart up to and beyond my lactate threshold increases the body’s ability to use oxygen and break down sugars for energy, and over time will actually increase the lactate threshold meaning that my aerobic range increases.
And then there are recovery rides. Some coaches say that recovery is the most important part of training. Base mileage is the foundation that allows you to do overload rides. Recovery is the time when you let the body rest and rebuild after the overload ride. Recovery for me is a combination of rest (taking a day off) or doing a slow ride for an hour or two, just to keep the muscles limber and the blood pumping. A recovery ride involves sub-aerobic (i.e. “fat burning”) or low-aerobic effort. Even so, my recovery rides aren’t just “slow distance”. I use my recovery rides to practice bike handling skills, work on my pedaling form, test out different riding postures, etc. And, of course, sit back and enjoy being outside, perhaps chatting with other cyclists who I encounter.
Those rides have specific purposes, and my overall training plan has a specific purpose: to prepare me for whatever event I have in mind. And it works. I’ve used those training plans to train myself for many different events, and I used something very similar to help Debra go from not riding at all to completing a three-day, 335-mile ride in just a year of training. The key is to make every ride count.
The problem is that my season has ended now. I have events planned for next year, but I’m not going to start training specifically for them until late February. I’ll continue to ride a bit, but this is the time I should be in the gym working on core and upper body strength. Extreme endurance rides take a toll on the neck, arms, stomach, and back (especially the lower back), and I need to build strength in those areas if I want to meet next year’s goals.
Unfortunately, I’ve announced that 20,000 goal and I need to ride 100 miles per week until the end of the year in order to meet it. And since I don’t have a particular event in mind–something I’m working towards–those miles are “just exercise”: putting in the miles. Thus my diminished motivation.
So if it’s more than miles, why do I talk about miles at all? Because it’s a reference that will mean something to cyclists and non-cyclists alike. Most non-cyclists will automatically assume that a 50 mile ride is harder than a 25 mile ride. They won’t generally understand that the 10 hill sprints on the 25 mile ride made it much more difficult than the 50 mile ride at medium effort. Another cyclist, though, who knows me and has an idea of my current fitness level, will infer quite a bit of information from a simple post about how many miles I rode this morning. He’ll know that a 50 mile ride was probably base mileage, that a 10 mile ride was recovery, and anything in between was most likely overload: sprints, hills, or time trial.
As for next year’s events: nothing specific to announce yet. I will say, however, that I’m planning at least one ride that’s longer than anything I’ve ever done before.