CanadianBiker32

What would be an example of a good recovery ride . this is not after a race
but a separate day. like a day or 2 after doing a major event.

thanks

Carbonfiberboy 

If I'm early in my macrocycle, I do a long recovery ride, up to 4 hours. Later in the cycle when I'm doing more intensity, I'll just do an hour. I do it by heart rate and keep my HR down as close to zone 1 as I can. If I'm doing a shorter ride on rollers, it's all zone 1. The longer rides I do on the road and keep my HR mostly in zone 1 but also the bottom half of zone 2 to get up small inclines. I do them on the flat or shallow rollers. I keep my spin up and my gears small. I don't want to have any sensation of my legs working. I once did have a young girl on a pink bike drop me on a hill. I try not to eat much, if anything, to promote fat burning. For this geezer, that's a HR of 105 on the rollers and no more that 114 on the road if I can manage it.

I usually do them the day after the event, not 2 days later. 2 days later, still being whupped, I'll do something different, getting on my rollers and doing usually 15-45 minutes of steady high cadence drill or one legged pedaling in zone 2, sandwiched between a 15 minute each zone 1 warm up and cool down. That stimulates my body without creating much of a training stress.

Frequently I'll do a 1-3 hour zone 2 long steady distance (LSD) ride, not really a recovery ride, but to stimulate the low end metabolism. If I'm doing big rides every weekend, all I'll do is recovery and LSD rides during the week. I've met riders on the road who were out for a midweek evening LSD century. That's a bit much for me.

chasm54

CanadianBiker32, you must have started more than twenty threads in the last two or three months, on various and seemingly random subjects relating to training. Various questions about supplementation, heart rate, meaningless power statistics, vaguer questions about "what do I need to do to get better?" and so on. Quite often you never return to the threads you start. The impression given is that you make no attempt to systematically acquire knowledge, or to develop specific goals or a specific training plan, you simply come here to ask whatever question happens to enter your head, pay little attention to the answers, and then come back when something else occurs to you.

Buy a book. Coggan and Allen, Chapple, Friel, it doesn't matter. Read it. Develop a training plan. Come back here for ideas, or to help you clarify issues you don't understand, by all means - but proceeding by just asking random and largely unconnected questions isn't going to give you what you need.

hambertloot

+1. So true

And a proper recovery ride? For the most of us 60-80 minutes is far more than enough. If you are sweating, you are going to hard. If you're passing people you're going too hard. If runners are passing you or the big fat guy who is going 12mph passes you, you are doing it right.

Cadence around 95+, i usually end up averaging 13mph

DataJunkie

I take my kids out and and spin in a low gear. 1 hour ride and around 10 miles. By myself I may ride 15 miles in over an hour.