Thanks!

Up until this year I mostly only rode long 5+ hour rides on the weekends and little or nothing during the week to train. That worked well enough to comfortably finish all the brevets but my hill climbing was abysmally slow. (I live in northern California, lots of hills.)

This year I took a completely different approach. My weight had slowly increased and I started riding on the trainer in the morning just to burn calories. That pretty quickly changed to intensity training.

Now my regime is:

Four weekday mornings a week I ride my trainer in the garage for an hour. One of those mornings I do three standing intervals where I ride max resistance in my biggest gears. When I started I could do about 75 pedal revolutions for each interval. Now I'm up to three intervals of seven minutes each with three minute recoveries between them. I plan to keep increasing them until I can do three 15 minute intervals. The other three days of the week when I'm not doing intervals I just spin, burn calories, and watch Mythbuster re-runs on my iPad.

Four times a week I go out for a one hour ride at lunch. Three of those days I go at about 75% effort and one day I treat the ride as an all out time trial. I live on a flat island (Alameda) with a 45 minute loop around it so its ideal for my lunch ride. My fastest average speed for the hour went from 16 mph to 19.2 mph.

I also commute 15 minutes each way four days a week. Not much of a workout there but it gets the blood moving in the evening.

Wednesdays I don't go near a bike.

On the weekends I don't do much this year. I haven't done any long rides that were not brevets other than the Davis Double Century which I hammered through in record time. I rode about 3400k in brevets before the 1200k this year. The rest of the weekends I might do a very fast hard ride to a coffee shop an hour and one mountain away. Or I might go out for a very very slow three or four hour ride with a friend who just started riding longer rides.

The result has been much more power on my later brevets. I ride faster without trying. I find myself riding with a whole different group of people on our brevets (the ones who used to be leaving the early controls as I was arriving at them.) I never find myself grinding up hills anymore. Sometimes I float up them, but never super fast. On the 1200k my legs were never tired and I could stand for 30 minutes at a time even a few miles from the end.

The nicest thing about being a tad faster is the extra time I have to spend on longer rides. For instance on the San Francisco 600k I was riding with two others and we decided to stop for beer and BBQ oysters along CA-1 near Pt Reyes.

From now through October I'm training for the Furnace Creek 508 (4 man team) where I hope to totally kill my old time on stage 3. I don't plan to change my training plan much for that.

So for me anyway, I'm finding that for where I am in my conditioning, interval and intensity training has provided way more benefit than long slow rides on the weekend. Chris Kostman says he trained for RAAM (cross country race) doing no rides longer than 50 miles. I never bought into that but I can see how that might have worked now.