OK, I understand what you are saying, but what about for the "average cyclist" who is interested in improving general performance and stamina on the bike?  Take ME for instance, I'm 58 and have been riding fairly regularly for about five or six years now (OK, a lot less in this cold weather).  I am now doing most of my training indoors on a trainer and rollers.  I hope to participate in a MS Bike Ride in early June that will involve a century (my first) and a 50 miler the next day.  What would the the optimal mix of long (boooorrriiinnnnggg) steady rides on the trainer and high intensity sprint training?  I know a little about periodisation and will sit down soon to work up a plan (any help here would alos be nice).

Bill

Hi Gail,

I ride in sunny Florida, so I train year-round and I do have a nice endurance base to work off of, but not much time to train.  Therefore, to prepare for a race I do a lot of intensity training and I must disagree with your statement that for long events you need to do long training rides.  I've proven in my own training that you can build aerobic base w/o long rides only using intensity. 

For example, last year I did the a 155 mile race with only 50-60 mile long training rides on the weekends and placed 20th overall in 7 hrs with an avg speed just over 21 mph.  I focused on short high intensity workouts and tried to do 2 to 3 of them per week and had great results and actually did better than all my teammates who did the long 100+ mile rides w/o the intensity training.

Thanks,

Rick K.

Dr. G, you're probably right about the boredom folks experience.  I hear it all the time from folks, but I've never had a problem with it, but then again I don't do 7 hour training rides;)  For me training is short and hard and I do Century+ races with the other guys who do the long rides and can easily keep up with them all day no matter how fast I go out.  It's totally against all old training advise and it's kinda outta the box thinking, but you should try it cuz it works.

Rick C.

Gale - Is there a combination of volume and intensity training that makes sense while you are building up to your event distance?  I am running in a 15k race in 25 days.  I was sick recently and was set back in my training 17days. I feel like I need both training methods to reach the time or goal I set for the race in December.  Thanks Brad

Volume Vs Intensity

Especially with regard to periodisation, I think this question tightly pivots around weekly training time.  8, perhaps 10, hours at a bare minimum are what I would consider weekly ride times that may make riding around at 16mph, when you are capable of 20+, a way to start a season, NEVER going past lactate threshold at least for a few weeks. 

You wrote: "..the judicious use of high-intensity workouts during the offseason will most likely not damage or ruin your fitness. "

Well, damaging your fitness comes with orthodox base training.  It's actually part of the point of it to begin with.  The degree to which you keep your fitness up restricts your ability to adapt to a higher peak latter on.  For a moment, it sounded like you consider the above to be the holy grail and I am not sure you meant it that way.

I'm a cycling racer who has been training, with watts, for going on four years.  Another unexpected characteristic I discovered was how strength and fitness can, and do, follow distinctly seperate trajectories over a season.  IMO, you can't stack a maintainance program with sprint, to TT, preparation all year and get the same results you would if you base train and resistence train (weights, slow hills) and then move on to higher stress endurance and VO2 workouts closer to when you want to peak.  Its sort of like burning the candle at both ends (LSD and intervals <30seconds), before adopting a regular cycling calendar.