Long vs short training rides for double century
 

I'm aiming for a double century ride (~315km) in early January - a route of my own devising, with one 1000m climb and a few other undulating sections. Normally, in preparation I'd head out on lots of 100-150km rides, both for training and because I enjoy them. (My previous longest day ride was 220km, but back in 2014. I think I'm ok with the psychology and logistics parts of the ride, I'm just trying to get back into that kind of shape from a kind of moderate fitness base.).

However. My city is currently in lockdown, with a vague rule about "not exercising outside your neighborhood". So to do more than about 40km at a time basically means loops, which I find a bit dull if they're back to back.

So my question is: what is the difference in outcome between say:

1) Monday: 2x40km loops back to back (80km), Tuesday rest
2) Monday: 40km loop, Tuesday: 40km loop

That is: is it better or worse for that second loop to be straight after the first one, or when starting fresh?

I am currently also doing a bit of interval training, although since I'm a bit new to it, I'm probably not doing it "right". (Basically, riding up a hill as hard as I can, which takes around 2 minutes, ~4 times in a row.)

(I'm lucky to have quite a bit of flexibility in my schedule, and can ride during business hours. Less lucky to live in a big, locked down city with a lot of people on bike paths etc, and police waiting to question you about being too far from home...)

I did some loops back in March and April when the advice was to avoid shops and cafes, it wasn't too bad. I ended up doing cloverleaf-style rides instead of the same loop out-and-back, but if you've only one good loop you can reverse it for a bit of variety. I would rather do a 80km ride for the endurance benefits of the longer ride rather than back-to-back 40km days. The 40km rides would be good to do for some rides at higher intensity though, so there's room for both.

I don't think you need to be distance training just yet. Whatever keeps you fresh. Hopefully the lockdown will work and by october you'll be able to do longer rides without danger of official sanction

You're more likely to ride two 40 km loops at a fast endurance pace which will provide more benefit than 80 km at a slower pace.

Stress is proportional to the square of exertion in terms of both accumulating fitness and spending it.

At 30% lower effort you can go twice as long.

Stephen Seiler opined 7-10 minute intervals as hard as possible were most efficient at lifting VO2max and power at lactate threshold.

Stop when you can't exceed your anaerobic threshold because you're accumulating fatigue without doing much to improve fitness.

Ok, that makes sense and is a nice straightforward answer :)

I looked up one of his papers where he basically showed that almost all elite athletes converge on a split of 80% low intensity 20% high intensity in training. Which then made me realise that the needs of elite athletes and myself are pretty different. I guess I'm trying to build muscle, and efficiency, and cardio fitness all at once. I guess probably the more the better at this stage.

Stop when you can't exceed your anaerobic threshold because you're accumulating fatigue without doing much to improve fitness.[/QUOTE]

To be pedantic, it's one session in five which will be much less training time.

While they have better genetics, are closer to that potential, and train a lot more they still have human physiology.

Studies have found benefits from polarized training down to four hours a week.

E.g. https://www.peakendurancesport.com/e...onal-athletes/ although it may be a bit contrived.

"For example, one study looked at cyclists who completed two blocks of 6-week endurance training periods with similar total training volumes but with differing intensity distributions(1):

Polarized, averaging 6.4 hours per week spending 80%, 0% and 20% of training time in low, moderate and high intensity zones respectively;
A much more middle of the road (threshold training) block, averaging 7.5 hours per week spending 57%, 43% and 0% of training time in low, moderate and high intensity zones respectively.
Although both training periods produced fitness gains, the polarized training regime resulted in a 5% extra gain in peak power output, a 48% extra gain in high-intensity exercise capacity and a 7% extra gain in power output at lactate threshold"

Thanks, that's a really interesting and helpful article. It also has this to say:

> In terms of training prescription then, it is likely that many recreational athletes may not need to adopt a polarized approach to maximise performance – although including some zone-3 sessions is still likely to produce benefits.

One of the other motivations is to improve my fitness enough that I can keep up with some of my friends for joint training rides when they become possible as well. I have one friend who is still commuting to work, 18km each way 5 days a week. Eep.

Getting in shape is fine, but you don't really need distance to do that. I feel like the occasional 100-200km ride is helpful, but also that's what I'm training for anyway.

Drew Eckhardt great advice. I watched a GCN segment on Mark Beaumont and what he did to cycle around the world. He had the same bit of advice, shorter more intense rides. There was also a forum member who rode the dirty kanza with nothing more then short intense rides under his belt, but he also made use of a power meter and heart rate monitor.

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Here's a long article discussing polarized training. The author does give recommendations for how to do it, but also seems kind of negative about the idea--his criticisms seem to be that novices can get big gains from it, but can get big gains from anything, and pros can get big gains from it, but only because they put in such massive volumes of low-intensity work.

I was surprised at how much gain I got last year from a series of 100km rides. But I only did that for a few weeks before a 600km ride. That's why I was saying that could wait until deeper into late spring.

You don't mention anything about how long you expect to ride to complete your double-century. Without any real basis for advising you - all I can offer is that you ride enough to complete 200 miles across a three day period.
Most of long-distance riding technique is about selecting the correct starting pace and knowing how and when you may alter that pace as conditions on the ride present themselves.

Having a good base of saddle time is usually more important than calculating specific training sessions.

Good luck.