Speed Workouts

[indigoiis]

I don't know about getting into racing, so I can't help you there.

but.

I do know that the more you ride, the faster you get.

Also, ride with someone fast, once a week. Make it fairly short (15-25 miles) and chase them. That really helped me up my speed.

I also highly, highlyhighly recommend not dieting and training at the same time. When you are training, you are burning a bogus amount of calories, which is great for weight loss, right? Well, not exactly. Because you need to fuel the training, otherwise, if you just took the loss, you won't have any energy to ride. Kind of a vicious circle.

If you go into caloric deficit (from WW or any other diet plan) you should be careful to scale back your riding or running or other aerobic exercize to burn no more than around 200-300 calories a day. There's no real magic number there... it's just that you don't want to overburn and then go into starvation mode.

I don't know the science of this but you can get more info here.

You basically want to eat in a deficit of / exercize to only 10-15% of your maintenance - do slow weight loss (1-2 lbs a week.) To get your maintenance you can take your present weight and multiply by 15. That is about the amount of calories you need in order to maintain your current weight. Now take 15% off of that. That's how much you should reduce (either through exercize or eating less or a combination of both) in order to lose about a pound or two a week (which is the way to maintain weight loss - if you lose it slowly your body has more time to adjust.)

I lost 15 lbs this year in this way, before I started training. When I started cycling hard, I was eating about almost double my maintenance, just to maintain my present weight. If I had more to lose (I don't) I would scale back on the training and reduce my caloric intake.

Hope that is somewhat helpful... I'll be interested to read the answers about getting into racing as I too would like to race next season.

[sassyc]

If you go into caloric deficit (from WW or any other diet plan) you should be careful to scale back your riding or running or other aerobic exercise to burn no more than around 200-300 calories a day.

The nice thing about WW is that you do factor exercise into how much you eat, but I agree that it makes things harder. The days I don't do long workouts I want the same amount of food that I do on long ride days I've lost 25# so far, but I'm getting to the point where I need to switch stuff up.

That's good advice about riding with faster people, all my friends are faster than I am.... but always 'go easy on me' when I'm riding with them. I'll politely ask them to 'kick my you know what' and see how that goes.

Thanks indigoiis!

[ChickWithBrains]

Intervals! Intervals! Intervals!

There are a lot of ways out there to do them, and some excellent online resources about training (especially for race events) that incorporate them. Basically, they are periods of intensity -- higher speed, higher cadence, higher watt ouput -- interspersed with short periods of recovery. They might not feel so good at the time, and the rest never quite feels long enough, but after a few weeks of them you will notice your baseline speed has increased a fair bit. With continued work, you build a base of fitness and speed that's much more structured and noticeable than if you simply ride for long stretches without increasing your aerobic and mitochondial capacity. When I began doing intervals, my coach had me doing 2 10-minute intervals with a 5 minute rest during a 1 hour workout; now I'm doing 2 20-minute tempo intervals (even higher on the exertion scale) with a 5 minute rest during a 90 minute workout and some fast-cadence exercises afterwards. The rest is for endurance and putting the miles in.

Can't endorse intervals highly enough.