If you train, how often do you just ride?
 

I have hit my late 60’s, and get in 100 to 200 miles a week. For the last several years my riding has been just riding along riding. As a result I never get any faster, rides from 25 to 65 miles nearly always are 14 to 15 mph flat rides. I want to get faster, and know I need to periodic my training and improve my average cadence from 70 to more near 90. My question to you a who do periodize training, how often do you just ride without a fitness goal for that ride?

oh btw, at my annual physical Dr says I should just be happy with 14 to 15 mph. Not gonna happen.

I just ride I am over 60 so I just want to keep riding. Training is something else. My training if you want to call it that is I like donuts, ice cream, good beer so something has to intervene.

I'm 72 and I have always ridden with distance as my goal, rather than speed. When my wife (a few years younger) and I go on vacations, we typically do a fully supported 6-day, 5-night tour of 50-60 miles per day. We have also done self supported rides of similar daily mileage. It's when we're home that we are doing the "training" rides, about 50 miles per ride, as many days per week as we can manage, in between appointments, errands and home projects. We do this so we'll be in shape for our bike vacations. If we've been getting 3-4 rides in per week, we may put extra effort into some ride sections in an attempt to boost our average speed, or climb some extra hills, but we don't get obsessed over it. At the end of just about every ride, I expect to barely make it up my driveway, completely exhausted, and just like magic or something, that's what happens. I don't know how to train any differently.

But I guess if your goal is to go faster for a shorter distance, that's okay too. Umm, except that essentially, you're training to get somewhere in a hurry. Why are you in such a rush? Nevermind. None of my business.

74 here. I'm training for life. That requires rest. Hard day, easy day, rest day, repeat. I will leave the hard day definition - intervals or big hills, up to more HTFU among us.

Lots of books out there - 'Cycling beyond 50' has been out quite a while, maybe scientifically a bit outdated.

If I am riding my bike to run errands, I'll just putter along. But when I break out my road bike, my goal is fitness, so I tend to try to get as good a workout as I can. I usually ride 3 days per week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Mondays and Wednesdays I ride 70km on a closed cycling course at a large park. I use Strava to measure my speed, distance, and effort, and as the season progresses, I push a little more each week. I normally ride at a higher cadence, no matter what gear I use, I'm most comfortable at 90 rpm. On Fridays I do my long ride, between 130 and 150 km, riding along the river out to the countryside. I keep up a hard pace because I have to be back in time to meet my daughter's school bus.

It's not very complicated, the old saying is "If you want to ride faster, all you have to do is ride faster." I normally takes me about 45 minutes to fully warm up. At that point I mix in some intervals, that is, I pick up the pace for a few kph for a few minutes, then slow down until I catch my breath. I then repeat this a few times during the ride. Oddly, on my Friday rides, I find I'm able to ride fastest in the final 20 to 30 km, mainly because I am rushing across the city, and if I go fast enough, I can time most of the lights.

Book recommendation; Cyclists Training Bible. I'm 65, ride 10-15 hours/week and train with a coach.

To your question about Just Ride days, I define that as riding how my legs feel, some easy, some hard, cafe stops, and I do that when I ride with friends about once a month. Everything else is training focused, and especially the long duration/easier rides which require discipline to stay chill and not hammer.

We actually obtain the increases in speed and strength during rest weeks, so taking that easy week - days off and only super easy rides - is key.

I don't 'train' so much as just 'ride'.

Sometimes hard, often not so hard.

No coach, no group riding, so recreational.

At 76+ I don't hold any illusions about 20 mph averages over 100 mile rides, I'm thankful that I can manage 15miles in an hour a couple times a week. Yesterday I didn't quite complete my planned 26 miles, instead taking a shortcut at the end after 21 due to the 8 - 20 mph headwinds I'd been facing, just over 2 hours.

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...8306d7df5a.jpg
Downhill this section, fast!

Looking back where I'd come from:
https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...174a7245b2.jpg

Hills here are daunting! More than once I had to dismount, walk instead of ride. No shame in that as my HRM tells me I've crossed the 160 BPM redline already.

Still, it was a worthwhile endeavor! I feel fine this morning, anticipate getting in another stretch today out in the better conditions the weather service is predicting. I'll take it easier today than yesterday for sure.

With a training plan, there are no just going for a ride days unless that day is a recovery ride day and you have the discipline to keep your HR low.

Agree!

In that I'm older now (by a considerable number of years) than when I first started biking, there's so much more to it now than what I'd been exposed to back then, there's a lot of 'catch up' going on.

One of my goals this year is to look into training programs that don't require another human given the constraints of schedules and weather. Winter riding, done strictly on a wheel-on trainer despite (or because of?) the weather outside, is new to me.

This time of year it's the outside on a bike I look forward to, yet work schedule, weather, family, home maintenance, and any as yet 'unknown knowns' that might crop up tend to steal priority. Last summer it was a plantar wart on a toe on my left foot. Treatment, though successful, was almost worse than the affliction. This year even weather can see me back on trainer as required.

I welcome suggestions from the group here for programs worth looking into, maybe some that focus on those > 50?

I don't put much thought into my rides so I enjoy all of them. I do review my ride data and compare it to other rides while I'm resting after the ride. I might form some opinion as to whether my next ride should be entirely best effort or whether just a few segments should be best effort. But still, whether it's a very hard ride or not, I enjoy them all.

I'm lucky here, all I have to do is ride because we have hills. The saying is, "See hill, ride up it." And not just ride up it, ride it as hard as one can, so panting going over the top. Eugene has hills, go find them. That's really all there is to it.

For me 99% of rides are Zone 2 with some short hill climbs in between...

Same here. I really don't care so much about speed as I do seeing how many miles I can put in and enjoying the ride along the way.

spclark,
Here are some 'old guy training' things I got from working with a coach (vs previous canned plans). My goal is to be faster on my favorite, a 3-4 hour ride on hilly/mountain roads.

>Coach's interval workouts have more 20 minute pulls at sub-threshold vs the bing-bang-boom of Over-Unders. Hard pulls are usually 5 minutes, not 60 seconds. 1 hr ride example; 10 min warmup, 20 min at sub threshold, 5 min rest, then 2 x 5 min above threshold with 5 min rests. Most of his workouts are longer, 1.5 - 2 hours.

> To get stronger do strength training, low weight-more reps. Lots at body weight.

>Rest Weeks. Listen for your body's signals for when to start rest and when to finish rest. The schedule must flex to you.

My personal indicator of going into the red is sleep issues, like falling asleep in the afternoon or insomnia. I've started rest early and needed more than a week several times this year.

I was really lucky to have an available, hilly, competitive group ride. My first time out with them, I realized that the idea was to TT the ride, i.e. ride the course in the least possible time, duh. How to do that wasn't immediately obvious to me but I figured it out on my first ride with that group. The power necessary to maintain a speed on the flat is proportional to the cube of the speed. So what one does on a hilly course is to ride the flats in Z2 and give it all you've got on the climbs. If you get dropped on the climb, hold some power going over the top and you'll get them back. Thus TTing a course is exactly what one needs to do to get results. A caveat: our routes were chosen so that we climbed from 50'-70' per mile and our routes were in the 60-70 mile range, so no more than about 4 hours. Longer or more climbing than that and the usual cyclist can't hold Z4 on all the hills - one gets too tired. We also had a contested sprint at the end of every ride.

It turned out that this was, IME, all that was needed to ride centuries, doubles, and even 400k was those 4 hour rides at one's limit. "If you can dismount normally and walk comfortably at the end, you could have gone harder." We also did non-competitive long rides in the mountains to figure out what long distance efforts felt like and to get our hydration and fueling down.

We had a rather ordinary distribution of effort by zone, about what one would encounter on a well thought-out training program, but we didn't have to fool around with the usual planning of zone-based training, it just happened. During the week, we'd just ride Z2, get some more miles in. It seemed to me that averaging about 100 miles/week was enough. Some people would average much more than that, but it didn't seem to increase their performance on the long rides.

My neighbor, who leads some of the more convenient group rides, is 100 pounds lighter and 15 years younger than I am; so he (and the group) out-climbs me handily, and his Z2 paceline leadout is my Z3/4 hanging on at the rear for dear life.

But I agree that one or two power pole sprint or 4-8 minute climb the hill intervals per week gets me to some of the best shape I've ever been in.

Also, touring (riding 6-10 hours per day for a week or more at a time) works wonders. Concentrate on spinning, so your legs get used to it. As the old cold warriors said, "Quantity has a Quality all its own."

Right-O! My group had been riding together for maybe 10 years before I joined them. They were mostly 10-15 years younger than I - I was about 57 and had started riding at 50 but was clueless. The first year, I kept up with them for about first 30 miles. I'd get dropped on every hill but just rode back on again. Then I was totally dropped and rode the rest solo - they published the ride a couple days ahead, so I had a cue sheet. Took me a couple years of trying to be able to stay with them all the way. I spent those years trying to figure out how to become a stronger rider w/r to hydration and fueling. A few years later I was leading the fast group, and then suddenly I was too old, just like that.

The first year I tried riding in the mountains with them I drove to the start and thought, "How the F am I going to do this?" So I was dropped in the first mile by a couple women but just kept pedaling. I had the endurance from the group rides, but didn't have the power yet.

Anyway, if anyone's trying to get faster, that's how I did it. It took a lot of work. Try not to get discouraged.

And absolutely touring will fix you right up. I'd come back from a tour on the tandem with my wife, and folks would comment. Trick is to hold that fitness level!

Riding is training, training is riding. Having a power meter (and, to a lesser extent, a HR monitor) means I don't have to go out on explicit "structured training" rides. My head unit records power and HR (and speed, cadence, and altitude) and then my apps tell me how much training effect there was (by time, distance, power zone, heart rate zone, intensity, or speed) so I don't have to think about them during a ride. I just ride, the apps keep track of almost everything else. I guess I do have to remember to weigh myself and update the apps every once in a while.

What that means is I don't have to have a fitness or training goal for any particular ride -- I do have goals over a period of weeks, and the apps do a reasonable job of keeping me on track so I don't have to worry about any single ride. That's pretty liberating.

If I had the time to train, I would tour.

Same here :) It is about 1300 miles(2000 km) per year.

I wish. I'll be lucky to hit 1,000 miles this year. I've just been busy with work, family, or whatever, and the heavy rains we had this spring kept me off my bikes for a while.

I guess my response to this thread would be that, if you are old enough to be reading the 50+ forum, then you are old enough to forget about how fast you ride.

But then, I've pretty much always felt that way, even when I was half the age I am now.

I started to train and ride hard in my late 50s. Had my best years in my mid to late 60s. I'm not the only one. Problem with being younger is folks get swept up in career and family and ignore themselves. If you want to be comfortable in your old age, keep at it. The older we get, the faster we lose it and the more critical it becomes.

Thanks for all the imput. I think I will be a day of longish sweet spot, a day of short duration HIIT, the rest of the days easy with some cadence work to get my comfort level cadence back to 85 to 90 now my easy cadence is 70 to75. And on long ride days just enjoying the slightly faster pace I hope to see.

The 50+ forum? We are large, we contain multitudes.