AndySchleckfan

Today I went out and did a two minute steep hill four times, giving it all I had, then gliding down. Before, (about 1hour delta inbetween) I had run six miles on the road at a good pace (a little sub 7). Is this a good cross-training workout to maintain endurance? As a junior, I bike at an average speed of about 19-20mph.

Edit: Endurance***

BoodBianchi

Avg. speed means nothing, avg. speed with gps means a little more.

WantsAPuppy

if you want to cross train go for a swim, take a ballet class, and do some weightlifting

echappist

sounds like the perfect way to burn yourself out

AndySchleckfan

Why would that burn me out?

musicmaster

Yes, running is good cross training. I'm a full-time collegiate runner running 80+ miles /week and use cycling as my cross training. I bike maybe once or twice per week and have no problems with going 30+ miles at 20mph with the group we have at school.

Running does wonders for your endurance. Just don't plan on runing all the time to get into biking shape. I think when I'm done running in college, I'll run 4 days per week and bike three days.

echappist

you are doing all out uphill efforts, and finishes it off with a "good paced" running for about 50 minutes. It may look beneficial at first, but try doing this for two months & see how your body reacts. in other words, you are not giving yourself enough rest. Also, the best way to gain bike-related endurance is to stay on the bike. And if you do have to take off a day or two, there's no need to sweat it.

incorrect. you are using cycling as a crosstraining for your main sport of running, while he's asking about doing running as a crosstraining for cycling. Not to mention the totally different primary and stabilizer muscles required for each sport. Running is a weight-bearing sport, and unless your muscles are up to task with all the pavement pounding, it's gonna be a pretty fruitless endeavour as a 1-2 time/week activity.

i used to be a runner too, nothing serious, about 40 miles a week. i've stopped lacing up my sneaks for nine months now and when i didn't have a bike at home, i went out for a run. What i got was not fitness but soreness that won't go away for four days, and this was for a moderate workout. The worst soreness i get on the bike last two days if i decide to do a mile-long hill climb for six times. That right there tells me that the muscles stressed in running have atrophied since i switched to cycling, and therefore would require something along the lines of light activity for two weeks before turning it into a 1-2 time/week cross training activity. A weight-lifting circuit is by far more advantageous.

Also, average speed means jack squat & you might as well stop referring to it.

musicmaster

He was asking about keeping endurance. Lifting will not do anything for your aerobic capacity. As far as your soreness, it could be due to you not having proper shoes. If you get fit at a running store, you may have been better off.

Personally, I think you need variety. Too much of something isn't good. Balance it out once in a while and it can benefit you. Swimming or Running aren't biking, no, but doing them once a week for a change won't kill you and could help your biking specific muscles recover

cappuccino911

he is a young kid so burnout is far less of an issue. the youngsters just have a seemingly endless supply of energy. Besides, 4 2 minute intervals is hardly a killer workout and if hes a decently trained runner, 6 miles isnt too tough. The first thing that jumps out at me is that you took an hour break between the two. Thats a no-no. your body goes through various states and once you start resting for a certain amount of time, your body is going into a mode where it wants to repair itself and when you start working out again your hampering that. If your going to do both disciplines you need to truly make it one workout or look at doing one in the morning, one in the evening.

Regarding weightlifting and endurance, endurance on a bike is a lot of hours of repetive motion. It band issues are prevalent in both runners and cyclists. Strength training can be very helpful to prevent these overuse issues so while the strength training itself isn't going to improve your indurance, a proper strength routine will help you avoid injuries that come with endurance efforts.

echappist

I have the proper shoes, along with the special foot inserts. Soreness wasn't a problem when i ran 40+ a week, along with some intervals thrown in.

As for variety, it depends. It depends on whether it's on or off season. It definitely won't help when you are training for bike races. In the off season, given the necessary time needed to adapt to the high impact nature of running, it just requires too much time to get started to be useful. Knowing now that i'm no longer conditioned for running, if i were to run in the off season, i'd start with 3 miles a day at 4 days a week (compared to an average of 7 to 8 for 5-6 days when i took running seriously). What kind of endurance boost that will provide, i do not know. I'd say nordic trainer or swimming would be much better.

Then again, given the periodic way of training, just sitting on your ass and not doing anything might not be too bad. Of course you might need a month to go back to where you left off, but the body needs time off mentally and physically.

Also, as you probably know, weight lifting (especially the circuit ones) are also helpful. Cycling is not just about endurance, it's also about force output, etc.

Now if you are training to be a triathlete, that's a whole separate story with running.

echappist

don't be so sure. i'm 25 & it took a few seasons of severe overreaching to teach me that you just can't pound it out day in & day out. For reference, a recovery/endurance run, which is what you should be doing if you really want to run after doing anaerobic intervals, is 7min/mile for world class distance runners.

also, as you surely realize, there are different types of intervals. while the ones requiring maximal 2 minutes efforts often come in sets of 6 or so. if you do these correctly, you should be limping home on your bike and not have much in reserve to go at it again for another hour

cappuccino911

25 is old. Just kidding! I believe this kid is 15 and ther eis a huge difference between 15 and 25 in terms of how your body responds. certainly 2 minutes of maximal effort is pretty brutal, but at age 15 these shouldn't be too too hard. Don't forget, he did his run first then took his hour break. he should have run, took 5 minutes to change into cycling shoes, warmed up on the bike (yes he's warmed up from running but get a sport specific warmup by riding slow for a bit), and then gone for his intervals.

W Cole

I'm pretty sure you could get to at least a CAT 5 level by running and only riding one day a week. My buddy runs every day and rides with me maybe one day a week at best and hes almost as fast. So I think running will definitely help your riding unless you're at an elite level.

Personally I don't run anymore in addition to cycling because I'm not really interested in being a good runner and I think the time can be better used in the gym or spending additional time on the bike.

agarose2000

I think you're forgetting the fact that the OP is already a fairly strong runner, and definitely will be able to get a super-solid cardio and leg workout from a hard run. You might not be able to get as good a workout on the run because you're not a runner, and I could thus understand why you would avoid running because of the soreness and adaptation requirements, but that doesn't apply to the OP.

Running inflicts far more impact on the joints/bones than cycling. Cycling does require more power to be fast, but the pounding (force in a very short period of time) of running is much harder on the body than cycling. So, runners tend to have an easy time getting onto the bike without muscle soreness outside of butt/back pain from not being used to the cycling position.

I came from a solid running background (I ran about 7 minute miles for a marathon), and I found that within 2 weeks getting comfortable on the bike (didn't ride a bike since childhood), I was consistently with the Cat3 and up front pack in the big roadie hammerfest rides, and could outpace most of the 4s/5s without any bike-specific training. I actually was wondering what was wrong with everyone for my first few rides, as I'd start in the baaaaack, where all the 4s & 5s were talking about where they'd attack, who they'd draft, and how fast they wanted to go, and on the first climb or breakaway, half of them would fall off even before I felt like I'd starting even to give it a effort that I'd consider a workout. I'd yo-yo between climbing up into the front pack, then falling way back into the 4s/5s again on the descents because of my lack of bike handling confidence (which I've now remedied!)


While I do agree that bike-specific training is absolutely necessary for optimal improvement, there's no doubt that the only reason I could do so well so quickly on the bike was my running background. My experience isn't unique either - I train with a big trigroup with lots of pure runner folks like the OP, and they're ALWAYS good on the bike, and are almost never, ever dropped in the group.

I love cycling, but I personally thinkn that unless you're a high-level racer or aspiring to be one soon, if you're limited on time, running is the way to go. I'd guesstimate a 1 hr running workout vs a 1hr cycling workout of the same intensity (judged by my HR) to be nearly 2x harder on the running, because of the impact. If we add downhills/coasting, I'd have to bike 3x as long to equal a run workout of similar intensity. (Yup, a 2hr run workout = 6hr bike workout on the road for me.)

wacomme

I've been following this discussion with interest. With the biking off-season I was going to transition to running as my endurance exercise with some core strength training mixed in. However, the more I read the more I feel I need to be on the bike. I now ride less frequently. I'm watching my TSS score fall (power meter user), and this bothers me somewhat. I was wanting to compensate for the downward TSS trend by integrating a comparable running score into my Golden Cheetah tracking program, but have now realized that my power meter metrics are relegated to cycling only - thus the need to get in a ride every now and then; for the most part, what's good for cycling stays with cycling. Therefore, I'm now riding some, running some, and weight training some.

My concern is what type of riding I should do for the next month or two? I'm now riding perhaps 3x/week. Should I ride in my Sweet Spot for an hour or two, riding intervals, or focus on short endurance rides? I feel the need to ride hard to keep my TSS up and not lose too much FTP. Though physical and mental rest and recovery are essential too. Hmm.

agarose2000

For someone actively training with a PM, I'm assuming you're trying to race or push your limits. If so, 3x/week is minimal training, and you should go as hard as you can for as long as you can on all those sessions on the bike. Unless each of those is a 2hr+ hard session, that's simply not enough time regardless of how fancy and detailed your training program, to get better past a low baseline point.

Throw in running 3x/week on top of that, and now we're talking planning intervals...I'd then still go nearly all-out with intervals whenever on the bike, and save the easier efforts for runninng since the interval efforts on running will beat you up much more in terms of recovery days.

At 5 or less training days per week, likely no recovery days necessary unless you're a newb (you're not if you have a PM) or are doing a lot of volume (1.5-2+ hrs) on each training session. The beat-down feeling from training 7-10 hrs a week with no recovery day is NORMAL ADAPTATION. Once you're doing over 10hrs/week of quality workouts, then start thinking recovery days.

wens

echappist

i know you are an accomplished triathlete, but this assertion is incorrect. i'm assuming he's asking about offseason training loads, which by definition should be really low. as for me personally, i'm gonna be doing 1 month of stritctly base (nothing over 153on the HRM when my FTP HR is 173), starting to incorporate sweet spot training the following month (start with one a week & maybe work up to three). starting with the third month, i'll do long aerobic intervals that target FTP, and i'll be doing this up til one month before racing, for which i'll start throwing in VO2 max type intervals

wacomme, do you happen to have Friel's book? One of the main gist of any endurance sport is the need to periodize, which, by definition, is going to reduce your training stress during the off season. There's nothing wrong with that, and your FTP gains are not gonna go away. It just happens that you can't hold top form year around, but once you let your body rest & start training again, you should see increases in your FTP

echappist

not to be snarky, but keeping up with 3's in a hammerfest is different from riding with the 3's in a race.

i know where you are coming from as I transfered by running fitness to cycling when i started biking seriously, but it's wrong to say that one hard hour of cycling is not worth one hard hour of running. For starters, the HR are not equivalent. I can hit 206 running, but i think my max cycling HR is 190. I made the same incorrect assumption that you made when i started cycling, and as such, i always kept my "endurance ride" avg HR around 155, which i now know is way to high as it should really be around 142. It doesn't matter if you are running, cycling, swimming, or erging, an hour of training at lactate threshold is an hour an threshold

Phantoj

How is "the impact" that makes running 2x harder than cycling causing any beneficial adaptations for a cyclist?

hansel

coming from one junior to another. The best way to stay in shape over the winter is to ride. I hate running with a passion (not to say i dont do it every once and a while). try to spice it up, do intervals, pyramids, and stuff like that. I just built up my track bike and have been incorporating it into my workouts and i can definitely say that it has made me faster. at this point im not training to get ready for a race so im just trying to perfect my offseason workouts before it gets here. Pobably take 3 to 4 weeks off than ween myself back onto the bike and get ready for battenkill. I feel that after riding all season and gaining a whole lot of muscle in my legs its harder for me to run the same paces i was doing in highschool. (5:30 miles) because its so much more weight to throw around in your legs. I would say to do what ever you think might work, try it for a week and if you feel like you have progressed than stick with it. But remember running is very hard on the body and you can really overdo it. I know a kid that ran across the country before he left for college on a full ride for cross country, he blew himself out and lost all of his funding.

hansel

agaross had obviousley never hammerd 40 miles on a fixed gear.

agarose2000

Couple clarifications here:

- I'm NOT asserting that Running is much better than cycling. You obviously need sport-specific training in each sport to do your best. At the highest levels, it's apples vs oranges, but at the lowly amateur age-group levels, there's a lot of overlap.

- 1 hr of hard running is DEFINITELY harder on the legs/body than a similar-intensity cycling effort, even if you keep a slightly higher HR on cycling. Running is weight bearing, and impact-prone, and that's why you cyclists feel the pain after going on a run whereas us runners can jump on a bike and have no leg pain the day after even if we go pretty much all out. Elite marathoners only race ONE marathon every 4-6 months because it's so hard on the body just to go for 2.5 hrs running hard; they need the months just to recover from that hard race effort. Elite cyclists can race a lot at distance without risking a stress fx or overuse injury. Just because the HRs might be comparable doesn't mean there's a similar stress on the body. 6 hour training runs are nearly unheard of, even by elite ultramarathoners, whereas 6-8 hr training rides are pretty routine for even a short-distance competitive cyclist.


- While for CARDIO, HR=180 is the same whether you swim, cycle, or run, the sport-specific muscle adaptations are not the same by any means. You guys agree with me on this, as clearly you're arguing that running doesn't x-over to cycling well. There are a few ex-olympic qualified swimmers who train with us who have monstrous aerobic capacity yet can't even keep up with the measly 22mph intermediate group bike paceline because they're lacking the leg training to match. (Note that their HRs still go thru the roof on the bike even at those slow speeds.)


- And yes, I know keeping up with 3s+ in a hammerfest definitely doesn't equal racing 3s in a official race, but I know that most of the 4s/5s in the group I was with couldn't keep up with them even in training, let alone a race, which is why I was surprised to be hanging with them as a total noob.

wacomme

I have Friel's book but I haven't read it yet. I'm somewhat new to power meter training and more structured training altogether. I feel that I should take a break from heavy training in the off-season, but I don't want to lose (at least not too much) FTP measures I've gained this past season.