Originally Posted by
ltmark
I'm training harder than ever for a Century in August. I live at sea level and the ride is at 5400' in Salt lake City. I'm riding way more than ever before (age 62) and actually hate missing a day. I typically ride 5 days 20-30 miles and one long day 50-70. However, I have been doing a lot of hills and on some routes, I just grind out the hill miles until my legs just can't do it any more.
Some days, I start out and my heart rate is really low, even when working reasonable hard, but my legs are still pretty tired from the previous day. On days like this, should I take the day off? Is continuing to ride actually counter-productive?
"I am riding more than every before" Motivation = very high. Likely chance of success without injury or overtraining and / or poorer result = very high.
I wanted to challenge your thinking a little and point out a couple of things. Your event is a couple of months away. Long event rides require a lot of base mileage. These use your fat burning energy producing system so you need the longer zone 2 low zone 3 rides. You can gradually increase intensity for some part of the rides and do some hill climbing at Zone 3/4 and throw in a little Z5. Pushing hard up hills until you cannot do it anymore and having dead legs the next day and going on another ride is not great training and recovery. Training and improvement is about being able to recover. We measure our fitness / ability by our recovery capability after prescribed training regimes. The prescription you are following does not offer enough recovery.
You have not indicated the degree of difficulty of the course other than it was at 5400 foot altitude. I suggest using the last month training on similar hills i.e. a proxy of the course. As far as altitude, we live and train at sea level and our district TT championships 40K are at 5000 feet in the Sierras. We have tried a couple of simple things to improve but the fact of the matter is we cannot spend enough time at altitude to acclimate. The best advice is to accept that you will perform a little worse at altitude BUT your speed will be faster even with less power due to the thinner dry air. They key is not to push too hard and dry out the mucus in your lungs - very bad. The thin dry air is tough on your lungs.
On training and altitude, the best training is to sleep at altitude and train at sea level. This causes an increase in bloods oxygen capability and the lungs and other systems adapt to the altitude. The training at sea level allows you to process more oxygen hence an increase in performance. I suspect most of the pros getting ready for the TdF are in the mountains sleeping at altitude and training in the valleys.
The other solution is a hypoxic tent.
http://www.hypoxico.com/ We have looked at this in a non serious way. It works but seems too much hassle. Good luck.
