Training for long rides

[lph]

Resurrecting my own thread here. to say EEEEEP! 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

Heeelllp...

[silver]

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?

[lph]

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...