Training Advice
 

It is good not to be the slowest one anymore but I am still pretty slow. I have been at it for about 6 months and have tried to step my game up in the last couple months. I ride 3 times a week 2 solo 1 group. I am a big guy 6'2" 228lbs not fat. I can do 20+- mph solo in the hills for about 30 miles.

So I am looking for advice on training. The group ride I do is pretty competitive. Two local teams meet up about a quarter of the way in and take off. We head right into some hills and I cannot for the life of me keep up for more than a couple miles. HOWEVER, after I get dropped I get into a good pace and start moving ahead of people who were dropped after me. By the end of the ride I am maintaining my pace and flying passed people who held on almost the whole ride.

Clearly I need to work on my speed so...
-I am riding about 80-100 miles per week in 3 rides. Is this enough?
-Should I be start specific training (sprints, hills, spinning) or does that really matter at this point?
-Is it better to ride with the group as long as I can even if it means limping my way back the last half of the ride?



My goal is to do a crit in 1 year. I need athletic competition in my life. Thanks

Your doing good as is, don't worry about it too much you will get faster.

No. Try to up your riding to 5-6 times per week. It's not the mileage you get in 2-3 rides a week that will give improvements, but the consistent, day-to-day riding that gives biggest, and quickest gains. You're trying to force your body to accept bicycling as a permanent movement pattern. As it does, it adapts to its stresses & demands.

I group these together because they relate.
Yes, try and stay with the group as long as possible. What is probably happening, as it happens to 90+ percent of people who can't keep up, is the group is accelerating at some point, and this is when you fall off. Chances are good that the group relaxes the accelerations a bit farther down the road, and then gets into a constant pace with less sudden accelerations, working together to just move along.

Your body is having trouble with this cycle of accelerations followed by fast pace and more accelerations. Many people can handle the accelerations, but find that they can't recover at the in-between pace of, say, 25mph. This is simply because they don't regularly train or ride that way. What they do is, hard effort followed by recovery at 10-11mph or they just constantly ride at a middle-of-the-road 17mph. So when they get to a group ride, they follow the first acceleration, but the easing of the pace to only 25mph doesn't allow them full recovery before the next effort as their body isn't accustomed to that speed. So when the next acceleration comes, they're not recovered and they keep burning matches like this until they can no longer go with the acceleration. Then, they fall OTB, ride their own pace, and then recover. Then their body can get going again and push the pace. This is what is happening to you and why you pass all those other riders after they get dropped.

So, you keep going back. The accelerations of the group will function as your training, specifically as your intervals or sprint training. Each week, I would expect to see more and more improvement. Finally, one day, you'll be able to stay with the group the whole way (or nearly), like you suddenly broke through a barrier. (Keep in mind, you may have an occasional bad ride where it's worse than the week before, but ignore these, and keep going back & trying.)

And last... they have hills in Oklahoma?!? :thumb:

Oh yeah, one year is plenty of time. Just keep riding and building up a good solid base in your legs. Keep going to the group ride. Soon enough, you'll find you can keep up there, and the first race won't be nearly as hard as you think. Although crit-racing will be a different set of demands on your body and you may still well get dropped anyway. As you did with the group ride, keep going back, and you'll find that you improve each time.

If that is your actual average speed as shown on your bike computer and you aren't stretching the truth than you aren't "slow".

No computer yet. Based on maps and time my last solo was 19.4 mph over 29mi. I thought the maps and time method would be a more critical considering the clock never stops (I do my best not to stop however). Am I wrong? I am open to criticism on this topic. I have noticed that when I ride with someone who has a computer the measurments vary greatly. Some will say we were doing 23 others 18 so I have just take it with a grain of salt and check my map and time after.


Quite hilly in fact. About 200ft in the most varied terrain. Not climbs though... just hills. Good advice.

if you average 20 mph on a hilly ride you don't need any help.

A crit is nothing like a climb and being big isn't such detriment to your performance.

W/kg is pretty big on climbs.

[QUOTE=hansen01;17073993]
Clearly I need to work on my speed so...
-I am riding about 80-100 miles per week in 3 rides. Is this enough?
-Should I be start specific training (sprints, hills, spinning) or does that really matter at this point?
-Is it better to ride with the group as long as I can even if it means limping my way back the last half of the ride?

My suggestions:
-Ride 5 (or 6) days a week for 150-200 miles;
-Attack the hills (enjoy the burn) and work on intervals (this really helps when the group suddenly accelerates);
-Ride with 2-3 groups and also solo and you won't be limping your way back for long.

Depending on your other training (crossfit, etc.) and your diet, your weight will probably drop despite your gain in leg muscle. I am approximately your height (6'2 1/2") and before cycling I was 190-200 and not "fat". After cycling my weight has dropped to 170-175, and I've increased my caloric intake to avoid dropping below 170.

You should have no problems meeting your goals.

If you are averaging 20+ on 30 mile mountains, you probably have a VAM of 1200+ and will most likely be KOM on Strava and will be very successful in racing. For example, Ben King did this segment at a measly 19 mph:

Strava Segment | GMR to Baldy

Keep doing what you are doing. You seem bothered by the climbs but if your goal is to do crits your relative weak climbs are not relevant. Start doing some training races now. I suspect there is a weekly training crit near you.

Not even... 1) I ride in the hills not mountains. Most of the hills range from 100m to 0.5miles at the very longest. I rarely ever drop more than 2 gears and on alot I just stand up and stay in the same gear 2) I start and finish at the same elevation. 3) I ride 20 + or - not 20+. I did a true climb of about 1500ft a few weeks ago in Idaho. Higher elevation and no downhill segments - my speed dropped below 10mph on some stretches. I try to avoid delusion when possible :)

Getting more group rides will be difficult but I will try for more days solo. I spend a lot of necessary hours in my study hole at the library and try to practice soccer with my 4yo (the two things that take priority fam and school).

I am down from about 240 lbs already and have noticed a high % of that loss in my legs. I was sustaining that 240lbs while running 4mi 4x/wk at 7-8mph which is not fast but solid for a 240lber. I would love to get to a point where I am struggling to keep up with my caloric demands. I haven't seen that since I was a bachelor. Again good advice, thank you

No. You want to ride at leaast 5 days a week. Fitness is pretty much an exponentially decaying average of your daily work, and that can be higher when you have 20 hours of rest between two harder workouts than one longer workout every other day.

6-7 days can help endurance, although rest days on the bike require enough discipline to ride boringly slow even when pre-schoolers on tricycles are flying by. Some people don't have the disposition for that.

Yes. Threshold intervals can significantly increase the power you can sustain for an hour and fractions thereof. Shorter intervals can improve brief efforts.

No. The chances of the group ride being hard enough to stress targeted systems but not so hard you accumulate lactate and can't do a sustained effort are approximately zero.

Conversely if you want to road race experience riding close to other people and respond to accelerations is going to help.

You also need to work lower effort rest days, weeks, and months into your schedule. Otherwise you won't be fresh enough for your hard efforts to be tough, will over-train, and be both tired and slow.

What would you recommend for threshold intervals?

So targeted training should be performed at a level which can be sustained for the entire ride? Road race experience is secondary to increasing fitness right now.

2x20 minutes at or just under FTP or 3-4 x 10 at 105% with 5 minutes rest between intervals.

For the periods of interest, without the rest of the ride taking too much out of you that isn't possible.

The problem is that impact is non-linear. Past threshold lactic acid accumulation is proportional to power raised to the fourth power. Ride 20% too hard past threshold trying to keep up and your lactic acid will accumulate twice as fast putting a premature end to the effort. Simplistically fatigue varies with the square of power, although you also have a finite number of "matches" to burn past which hard efforts don't work.

On the bottom end loafing along in the pace line you don't stress things (and aren't taking 20 minute pulls up front which would help your FTP).