Originally Posted by
Carbonfiberboy
Is the weekend ride a hard, stay on the front kind of group ride, or do you noodle around solo and do what feels good? I do about this mileage and can sometimes manage this effort level without overtraining, but my legs go totally to hell at about 250 miles. They sort of work, but it's painful. OTOH, I'm 64. I don't know if it's just age or not training as well as I might.
The weekend ride is just whatever I have scheduled. It depends on what I'm doing I guess. It's important to not over train though. Recovery is just as important as the riding/training. I don't know if age is your problem. There are a lot of stinking fast guys your age and older.
Originally Posted by
Carbonfiberboy
I always thought I just needed to have the time to get 300 miles/week or so. I'll have to experiment some more? Not that I'm a 508 aspirer, but I do like doing long fast rides. One of my riding buddies does 20K-30K miles per year and is on track to do 1.5M' of climbing this year. He has incredible endurance, so that's what I thought it took.
I know a guy (several actually) like that. In fact I did an ultra race with him. He was like the EverReady Bunny. His downfall was that he was slow as a slug. Riding a ton of miles is fine if that's what you want to do but riding miles in-and-of-itself isn't going to make you faster. What good is it to have the endurance to finish a ride like Paris-Brest-Paris but not the speed to make the controls? I've done a boat load of ultra races (including three RAAMs) and have a couple course records here and there and I rarely ride over 10,000 miles a year.
I have to add, that I'm no Lance Armstrong either! There are a lot of people who are way faster than me! Maybe if I rode 20,000 miles/year...
