2 weeks until bike tour - help

[violette]

I'm doing the MS bike tour July 5th & 6th. It's in 2 weeks and, because I'm alone with the kids all week, I've only gone for 2 long bike rides. I have 2 weeks to train. WHAT SHOULD I DO? Train or Pray!!! It's 120kms return

[Norse]

Maybe a little of both? I was going to suggest power intervals - they help both with endurance and increasing your Vo2 max. If you just have an hour, you might try a warm-up of about 8 minutes, followed by 2 sets of 5, 2 minute on, 2 minute off max effort intervals, with about a 5 or 6 minute break in between the 2 sets. End with a cool-down. During the 2 minutes on, go as hard (or even harder!) as you can at a sustained effort; during the 2 minutes off, spin easy. If you just have 15, 20 or 30 minutes, do all out sprint efforts (preceded by a warm-up), shifting to a hard gear in the big chain ring, go all out for 10 seconds followed by 40 seconds off. Do as many as you have time for - if you have 1/2 hour, break it up into 2 sets with a little easy spinning in between. Of course, if you can get any longer periods of time in the saddle, do it!

Chris Carmichael recently had an article about this lack of time issue in Bicycling Mag. I think it's last month's issue, or try this:

http://www.bicycling.com/article/0,6610,s1-4-41-15997-1,00.html

Good luck!