Leading a Couch2Century group for weight loss
 

I'm going to be leading a Couch2Century group next year. This is first going to be offered to the clinic where I had my bariatric surgery through and opened to the public as well. I'm doing this to 1. Help others on their journey and 2. Keep myself focused heading into my second year. As this is going to be for people trying to lose weight and not necessarily a competitive/high speed recreational group, I'm focusing on nutrition and slowly building miles to complete a Century in September, with 2-3 Metric/Metric Plus rides along the way. Since I live in the Northern Midwest (Northeast Indiana), riding will likely not start in earnest until late March/Early April. I have a pretty good plan laid out, but any suggestions you all have may prove helpful too. Fire away with ideas.

Very cool. Build slow. Be consistent. Have fun.

Do a thread on progress and completion.

Leading a Couch2Century group for weight loss
 

Nice!

Great idea, keep us posted.

I think building slowly to able to do a Metric is what you need. I'd probably be aiming to do the Century in August, and build up with weekly 35 to 60 (say adding a few miles a week) group rides.

We have to build to the 35 first. I'm probably going to be leading people who will struggle with 10 miles at first. The plan is to build to 25 miles for a long ride by May then start stretching the long each week.

That's a great idea. Our C2C team (not weight loss oriented) had riders that struggled to ride 10 miles at the beginning (as well as some who had ridden 50+ miles before, but no previous centuries) and everybody who started our group century finished. Mileage from week to week never increased more than 10% over 6 months to build the base miles needed. It was kind of funny the last month to see everybody riding a metric century every weekend like it was nothing. We wound up with 4 groups speed wise and one of the strange things to me was watching riders who were blistering fast on 30 mile rides not being able to keep up those speeds once the rides got longer than 50 miles.

Some of the things that really helped me were: Team spirit, I tried 3 times to train for a century by myself and was unable to keep to a schedule, but disappointing teammates is a different story. Interval training, we met on Wednesday nights and did various interval training exercises with warm up and cool down times, the riders that made the effort to show up for every interval session breezed thru the century. Just riding, there was a lot of "bonus" rides on weekends in addition to the team long ride day, coaches, staff, teammates would just get together and ride somewhere, it mixed up the groups we rode with and made for a lot of fun, usually with lunch involved.

Not everybody made the century ride, about 25% of the people who were at the organizational meeting left (or were weeded out for having ridden a century) within the first month. Another 25% dropped out thru the 6 months of training (it really is a big project, and requires a commitment from families and riders alike).

Might want to push the Century into September then! :D

I wish we had one of those programs here, I would volunteer to help out.

If you can get just one person to follow your plan, then your plan will have worked. Any more riders that can follow the plan and finish the century are gravy. And don't worry if they don't lose as much weight as planned. The idea of riding the bike is to get more fit. Weight loss may follow, but not always, as a lot of that work has to occur on the input and not the output.

Good Luck. Keep us informed of what you plan for the upcoming week or two, and what actually occurred. Who know, maybe you'll get some people to follow your plan at a distance.

GH

Thanks for the encouragement. I'm going to create the training plan in Excel and set up a Facebook group/page, maybe a blog site.

I rode all winter last year except one month when the average temp was like 5F :-). Been slacking lately on riding, need to fix that :-).

I've lost so much weight so fast that I am not tolerating cold weather very well.

Well I'm with you there Bass as far as feeling cold, but not so much outside riding.....wool socks help both on and off the bike :-)

As one bariatric rider to another - great idea!

cold weather is tough - especially the 1st year.

My hands are still always cold and this is year 4