Training for long rides

Hiya :)

First year on a road bike here, and I have one major goal picked out. I really want to do this ride that goes completely around Jotunheimen, a mountain range I've been hiking and climbing in for years. Very very scenic route, an area I love, lots and lots of HILLS... 430 km, that's 267 miles.

I'm not sure if I want to do it already next year, though, or save it for later. My biggest constraint is TIME for training. I don't want to just finish, I want to finish it in style ;) Which means really training for it.

I read an excellent tip here somewhere about increasing mileage for endurance events (half of weekly total should be one long ride, increasing by 10 % every week until you're at 75% of the goal) and I've set up this neat little training schedule (love spreadsheets :rolleyes: ). But I'm going to have trouble finding time to do the increasingly longer rides every weekend for the final 6-8 weeks. I have a fair bit of time during weekdays though, to stretch my commute.

So how would it work to NOT do a really long ride once a week, but just increase daily mileage instead? I think maybe family bliss depends on my not doing more than one half-day ride in the weekend....

Would you do this all in one shot, riding straight through, or do it as a tour with camping or hotels set up and the ride spread out over several days? That makes a huge difference in terms of your planning.

I don't need to do a long ride *every* week (but when I can, it sure feels good). Thing is, a long ride... is a long ride. And I've never done one *that* long - 160 miles is my longest. So this is all hypothetical.
I think that if you are riding fairly long every day and get to the point where 60 km is just a pretty normal activity, then cycling isn't a big exertion, so long isn't long. You still have to deal with things like chafing at some point... but with all that daily riding there would be calluses!
I didn't find 160 miles to be all that much longer than 100 (tho' the tailwind the whole way helped).

All in one shot... :)

Everyone is different. In the 3 three months leading up to my first 200 miler, the longest ride I did was about 95 miles. It also had about 10,000 feet of climbing. :D

I find it hard to do much more than a century when I'm training, so I make those centuries hard. It's just hard to find the time. I also do a lot of interval work.

V.

And I generally like to have a longer ride before a LONG ride. So before my 600k last year, I had a 200 miler. And my long rides this year built up on one another in rando fashion 200k, 300k, 400k and then a couple of 200 milers.

I'd suggest you try to at least get in one 200 miler (or 300k) before your 267. Especially if the course is hilly. You'll also want some time testing lights, and riding with lights. With a hilly 430k, I imagine you'd have some time riding in the dark, and being comfortable with that by training in it is invaluable.

So how about starting your LONG training ride well before dawn, so you aren't spending too much more than half of a daylight day riding your bike, thereby alleviating the family missing you too much? That assumes you're in an area where it's safe to ride at night - even doing short loops of a dark-safe route, and then tacking on a different route when it gets lighter would work.

Thanks all!

I'm thinking I might do something in between - increase my daily mileage as much as possible, and then get in maybe 3 or 4 really long rides in the weekends. Starting a ride before dawn was a good idea too - I commute all winter so I have a whole box full of various lighting configurations :)

So far this is all very hypothetical, my longest ride to date is 83 km (yesterday)... Nice ride! worked on riding "gently" and came back feeling very fresh and un-tired.

Just curious, how long is your daylight during mid-summer ?

I sure can't add anything to the expertise of the long-long-distance women here, but only my own experience (which is limited to 100 miles of climbing rides).

You might check out the online books for sale by Arnie Baker. I bought his ACE (Altitude-Climbing-Endurance) book, and found it VERY helpful training for my first really hilly century. I especially appreciated his training schedules of climbing/miles for the last 8 weeks or so. I couldn't do all the miles and climbing he suggested, but I used the principles, and I feel sure that they helped.

The other thing, for me anyhow, is that the long weekend rides REALLY helped me prepare mentally, and I believe physically, too. I knew at what mile certain parts of me might hurt, and how I'd handle the nutrition, etc, so that when things came up on the day of the ride itself, I could say, oh, this is normal, I can push through it.

Good luck on your ride. That is an amazing goal. :)

Yep, I'm beginning to understand that a successful ride means as much mental preparation as physical. I've done a fair bit of long days hiking and climbing, but I get really down/weepy when I'm tired (sleepy) and I have no tolerance at all for getting hungry. My dh knows enough to just hand me food when I start getting snarky :D

Daylight - we don't have midnight sun proper in Oslo, but it's light all day round. You could probably read outside almost all night. The sun slides down at a very gentle angle and just barely dips below the horizon, so you just have bright twilight for a few hours rather than any real darkness.

The downside is that I have to commute both ways in the dark for weeks in winter...

So I guess you don't need to practice riding with lights... :rolleyes:

Resurrecting my own thread here. to say EEEEEP! :eek: a bunch of guys at work have not only been bugging me to do this ride this summer (instead of next), but have even decided to set up a team. I'm going to be under very heavy pressure to join them.

Which is fine, as such, as I'd love to do the ride and I'd love to do it with them, but I AM worried that I'm going to have trouble training enough for it. I'm really not into doing the ride just to prove I can finish it, I want to have a good ride and feel I can handle it. I would also rather die than be the weakest one in the team and just suck on to their back wheels the whole way... ;)

Which means some looong rides in my future. It doesn't help that they just laugh at my overtraining worries and intricately crafted spreadsheets on how to gradually increase distance and effort :D

Heeelllp...

I'm not expert either my longest ride is 139 miles. But I do think there are a lot of issues that come up later in rides that you don't have to deal with on shorter ones. (I'm talking at 110 versus 60 miles).

But one suggestion is to do back to back days of really long rides. I'm just making this up based on my own experiences, so take it with a grain of salt.

But could you first do back to back days of centuries on fairly flat roads, to get the feeling of being in the saddle longer? You coudl start early and then have the later afternoon and evening with your family.

Then maybe a month later try to do the back to back centuries on hillier roads?

Hey, that's a good tip, Silver, hadn't thought of back-to-back centuries. I'll just have to suck it up and do some fullday rides at some point, but don't think I can do one every weekend.

Sort of looking forward to all this now, in a slightly terrified way...