Juggling between work and cycling
 

Hey guys/gals. For those who work ALOT, when do you find time to go ride? Recently I have been knocking down between 50-65 hours a week and its hard to find saddle time. Iwork weekends too. If I do get saddle time, I am too exhausted to ride anyway.LOL. Riding before work isnt an option for me really because I wake up at 5:00AM. Maybe alot of you do most of your riding during the weekend?

I'm lucky enough that there are a couple of riders at work, and we have flexible schedules, so we can finish up early a couple days a week and get out for an hour or 2.

My longer rides are on the weekends with the shorter ones during the week. I try to hit the road by 5:30- 6:00 to get the miles in and still have time for the family. Also I dont have to be into work to early so that helps.

If I take, as a "given," that I must exercise in some way or another, then I find that riding my bike to work and back saves time. If commuting by car takes 30 minutes and commuting by bike takes 45 minutes, I get a 45 minute workout for the "time cost" of 15 minutes. That's a lot better (and less stupid) than driving to a gym to work out.

But with those hours you're working, it's tough to do anything but work, sleep, and eat. I hope things lighten up for you soon.

Yeah, its been pretty rough. LOL. Sometimes when I get home(after sitting in traffic), I will try to go for a quick ride. But I try to get out on the bike before 8PM. After 8PM, forget it, im beat and ready to hit the bed.

When not working.

There are 168 hours in a week. Sleeping 8 hours a day leaves 112 hours. A half hour for showering and shaving gets you down to 108.5 hours. Subtract 65 hours for work and you have 43.5 hours.

Time spent commuting can often be swapped for time riding. If it takes me 45 minutes to ride to work but 20 minute to drive, I can get 90 minutes of riding in at a net cost of just 50 minutes a day disregarding any "aha!" moments that occur while riding that have a huge impact on work. I also noted that if I'd ridden in the morning I didn't really need to warm up before I could go hard in the evening.

So get some decent lights (the Magic shine LED with a lithium ion battery pack is very bright, especially for $35) and ride after work. It's really nice after traffic dies down.

Hardly. I worked 105 hours a week for a few months once and didn't have time for anything.

When I worked 60 hours a week I had plenty of time for other things like flying airplanes, building stereo speakers, cycling, etc - working 5 days a week and sleeping 8 hours a night gives you an average of 4 hours for other things during the work week.

I didn't have time for TV though. After a while I realized it had been six months since I'd watched anything and cancelled my satellite subscription.

This disregards the wisdom of working more - studies show that after a while you end up with less productivity than you have just working 40 hours a week.

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/qu...ess-productive

Power meter + trainer.

60 hours/week is my "regular". Sometimes I get up to 70-75 hours. I work afternoons-evenings so I pretty much cannot get up in the morning. I need at least 6 hours of sleep. I invested in a trainer and a Powertap wheelset to continue training late at night.

It sucks not being able to ride outside but with those 2 things you get a quality training.

I work 40 hours, coach gymnastics 12 hours and need to spend some time with my wife! I wake up early 2-3 days a week to swim, run 3 days a week after coaching, and still have 100 miles available during the week just for commuting. Mornings are spinning/efficiency, ride home from work is sprints/intervals, ride to coaching is threshold for the first half (expressway) and accelerations for the second half (stoplights). Weekend is for a 3 to 5 hour ride on day and either a ride or long run the other. Sometimes I do an after-riding-home ride. That's about 20 hours per week of training plus 52 hours working. Then I have an hour or 2 in the evening to eat dinner and wind down, and the weekend afternoons for fun. And I'm horrible at managing time.

Commute to and from work by bicycle.

Back about 10 years ago, I spent a couple years working up to 60 hours a week, year round, and taking night classes (often with quite a bit of homework) from September to April. And yet I was logging 9000+ km/year.

My commute was 13. 6 km/day 4 days a week (the 5th day I had to take the bus so I could bus to the college immediately after work to take the night classes). That adds up to 54.4 km/week for, say, 40 weeks of the year = 2176 km.

Plus, as soon as the sun shone longer in the evenings, I'd add a little bit extra to about 3 of those commutes ... anywhere from about 8 km to 40 km depending on how I felt.

Plus, I rode a lot on weekends. Metric centuries, centuries, and longer rides most weekends from the end of March to about the end of October.

Good lights and get in some riding first thing. I mix up the commute and ride from home at 5:15 some mornings to catch the ferry to my office. Other days I drive in and get some intervals in before I start the work day. I find it gets exponentially harder to keep my calendar clear later in the day if I don't ride before everyone else shows up at the office.

I ride for an hour between 0400-0500hrs. Been doing it for 2 1/2 years. Sucked at first but I really enjoy the rides now.

ditto riding from 4:00 tp 5:00 am along with it sucking in the beginning.

I'm waking up at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow for a quick hour before work.
Walking up at 4:00 am seems crazy. :innocent:

LED lights with lithium-ion battery packs work _great_. I have fewer problems with cars at night than during the day (I speculate that they think I'm a motor cycle which is going fast and could put a big dent in their fender).

Take a look at the Commuting forum. Plenty of folks have solved the lack of showers problem.

I used to ride to work, but can no longer do that,.... because I live too close now. Honestly for me, I try to get in a ride during the week if I can, which usually means getting up ridiculously early and going for a ride before I go to work. But with the work I do, and the pressure that comes with it, I mostly ride in the weekends. I am trying to get back to 3 days a week, but it has not been easy. I have been jogging more often to still get a work out in just 30 min.

None of the places I've commuted to have had showers.

Use baby wipes ... or paper towels and water.

Jeez! Check this guy out. LOL.

I find this to be true also.

I suppose I can find time in the morning, as long as I am hitting the bed early.

I use my bike to commute Monday to Saturday as others above have mentioned, and ride the mountain roads Saturday from 6am to 8.30am before work, shower, then commute to work, getting there by 10am. Sunday I ride the mountain roads for about 90 km from 6am, getting back home in time for lunch and spend the afternoon with my family. Life is great.

There is no law that requires you to take the most direct route.

Ignore the people who are implying you have plenty of time -- everyone's non-work responsibilities (and sleep needs) are different. I don't have to work weekends, but I do have other things to do on them along with riding. Commuting has been the only way I get serious saddle time, and I've managed to put together a one-way commute (the other way is public transit), because I can't get up any earlier than I already do, and I'm a cranky zombie in the morning. That's not going to change, so I don't try to make myself ride then. If I can just get out the door and onto the bus with my folding bike, that's good enough. Then the ride home, I let myself, if exhausted and stressed from work, just cruise. Generally in those cases I cruise for a mile or two and then feel great and open the throttle and really ride, with a whole bunch of options route-wise to add some hills; occasionally I feel like crap all the way home, so I just poke along the almost-all-downhill way and enjoy the fresh air. Basically, with so many responsibilities, keeping riding from ever being a chore is important. It's a reward, not work. Yes, that's playing a mind game, but it works for me.

Additionally, I got rid of my car, so errands are generally bike-based as well. Slow, but miles.

Pair all these junk-ish miles with some focused interval or hill training in the few places in your schedule when you'll actually feel fresh.

If you have showers at work, even if you can't ride as your commute for some reason, get a beater bike, lock it at work, and ride at lunch. You'll be more productive after lunch for it.

Commute by bike.

Sounds like the OP's problem is more lack of energy than lack of time. I've been doing 60+ hours a week for about the last 25 years. My job (engineering) isn't physically demanding and I've definitely acclimated to the long hours, but I still find that the only way to have enough energy to get in a good workout on work days is to do it in the morning.

If that means getting up at 4am, then so be it - I just go to bed earlier. I'm not a fan of riding in the dark where I live, so I do intervals on the Kurt Kinetic during the week. If you're a TV junkie, DVR your prime time or late night favorites and watch them while riding the trainer. My work hours on the weekend are usually shorter, so I can do morning group rides for a couple hours on Sat and Sun and still make it to the office by 10 or 11am.

Sufficient sleep (7 - 8 hours per night) and a good diet will also make a big difference. Remember that your BMR working those kind of hours is probably higher than average. If you're training on top of that, make sure you're not running a big caloric deficit. Watch your macros and try to minimize simple carbs and highly processed foods (often hard when working long hours). Nothing wreaks havoc on energy levels like being on a blood sugar roller coaster. Good luck! Hopefully the long hours will lead to early retirement and lots of free time to ride :)

I think doing a day during the week is minimum and will give you continuity between weekends. Even 30 min easy, at night, can be useful. If you can do that a couple times then that would be awesome. Riding at night, even when sleepy, allows me to rest better and with less sleep, not sure if that would apply to you.

I used to have a pretty crazy work schedule, I think a typical one in the area where I lived. Up at about 5:30, walk to the station to catch a 6:11 train into the city, get a 7:38 train back, get back home 8:40 or so. I didn't have kids or anything so it was smooth sailing once I got home (plus the bars and restaurants were a block away). Usually I rode once during the workweek and then both days on the weekend. That was enough to keep me reasonably fit.

When I wanted to ride/race more I brought my bike into the city on Sunday, along with a pile of bike and street clothing. I'd get on the bike after work, I'd ride until something like 9, then get to the train and back home. On Thu/Fri (depending on forecast and my riding thoughts for the weekend) I'd ride until after peak train hours, get my pile of bike/street clothing, and ride the bike to the station and then home.

I couldn't take the bike on the train during peak hours, and every morning train is a peak hour train, so I had to bring the bike in on Sunday.

I enjoyed riding in the city so much that sometimes I'd take the train in on the weekend, using my train pass, ride for a few hours, then take the train back. I tried to time it so I'd be riding at night since that was most fun so I'd have to be careful not to miss the last train back (1 or 2 am).

I understand not training in the morning. I tried riding in the morning, for 5-6 months, 5:00 rides 2-3x a week, and it didn't work. 2-2.5 hour rides, I was just so slow, I couldn't work hard, and I was exhausted for the rest of the day. Ditto when I raced early (5:30 AM starts? I forget when the Prospect Park races started). We'd leave for the race at 4:15 AM. Killed me for the day.

Unless you are also married with small children, I don't see how you don't have time.

Would love to commute but where I work there are no shower facilities. Can't imagine going the day after the ride into work without a quick hose down.

Awsome posting!