Originally Posted by
thomclaire
10% sounds good. So if I rode 60 over 4 days, last week, then 70 miles over 5 days the next shouldn't be any issue, 75-80 miles the next. I guess after 3 or 4 weeks that 10% rule would begin to decline?
The 10% goes on although there are other complications. When you get to 200 miles a week you can add another 20.
You do need periodic (1 in 4 is traditional) rest weeks at lower intensity/volume to allow adaptations to occur, and there are limits to how many consecutive months you can increase load before you need an easy one.
You can plan a lot of this, although ultimately you need to see how things are going and make adjustments when you're not performing well.
Also, what do you mean by latitude to trade lower intensity for distance?
As an over-simplification, under popular models of sports physiology you can ride 4 times as long at half the power. From a fatigue perspective 90 miles at 15 MPH using 100W for 6 hours has impact like 30 miles at 20 MPH using 200W for 1.5 hours. Fast rides have longer lasting effect especially on subsequent hard efforts, recovery pace rides don't affect following days like endurance rides do, and there's probably an "all-day pace" you can sustain almost indefinitely. Fit issues which are OK for an hour aren't for a day in the saddle. Running out of carbohydrate stores can be a problem on longer rides. Regardless, it works well in practice - I never rode over 50 miles (some weeks) before my first century, and a fast 25 mile lunch time ride ~3 days a week was much of the ~125 weekly miles I was riding up to Ride the Rockies covering 418 miles over 7 days with 28,000 vertical feet.