Radish_legs

After five or six years off the bike, I got back on this summer.

I have about 700 miles in my legs. I know that not all miles are equal. There's some hard efforts in there, but I haven't been doing any interval training. The closest to that would be small hill training days. I have ordered a power meter so I have a better handle on getting objective data on my performance.

But I note on strava that the really strong riders are in the thousands of miles this season.

I've made big improvements since I started this summer. But I'm wondering what this curve of improvement looks like. Is it linear? Have I seen most of my gains already and the rest is hard to come by? Or can I see some "exponential growth" with upcoming efforts? I'm not sure how many of you have been in my situation of giving up the bike for a logn time and coming back. So the comparison is probably the person who started fresh on the bike in their first year at the age of 40 or so.

I've heard people talking about base miles and building up an aerobic base. The heart, lungs, and muscles have to restructure over time. But what does that curve look like?

gl98115

In general, exponential. For you specifically? It's hard for anonymous forum posters to know for sure.

Radish_legs

well, I guess with the power meter, I can conduct my own experiment here in a bit. See what my power numbers do over time.

caloso

Are you in a place where you'll be able to ride through the fall and winter? Or if not, do you have a trainer or rollers?

PhotoBiker1968

I think working up to and keeping a consistent miles/week is a better metric.

For instance, you say you have 700 miles in, but if you did them all in April/May and didn't do anything since the "fitness factor" wouldn't really be there, right?

I've been using the Strava MTS challenge to get my miles in with my goal of 1250km to get that snazzy MTS badge towards the end of the month ;-)

This was my first real road biking season since I was a teenager (30 some-odd-years-ago). I started out like a house of fire and realized I couldn't keep riding daily with any consistency. It took me a month or so of commuting and daily riding to work up to where I am now which is about 30 miles/day. I can keep this up for weeks now, in fact, I get upset when I can't ride (and people at work pick up on it).

I'm not after speed, my speed is good enough for me, I'm happy with small incremental changes. I am in this for fitness and just plain enjoyment of riding.

Radish_legs

I'm in Texas. I just bought some winter clothing. I have a trainer. My 700 miles are since July.

popeye

Get Goldencheetah, it's free. You will be able to track how your body reacts to training stress. A good rule of thumb is to increase stress no more than 10%/week if you want to make consistent gains. Intensity is more important than miles. If your really serious about this buy the book Training and Racing with a Power Meter.

merlinextraligh

Agree with Popeye: You can't try to draw a relationship between fitness and miles, unless you include intensity.

700 miles over 3 months just crusing around leisurly could leave you with very little fitness gain.

But if those same 700 miles included a bunch of hill climbing and intervals, you could see some real gains, even on that limited amount of time.

10 Wheels

It was 10,000 miles for me.

Here I am at 9,000 miles.

wphamilton

A proportional improvement gets harder as we get more fit. I think that it does not correlate with miles, but if you plot it over time with respect to some measure of fitness, with consistent training, I expect that the curve will look asymptotic to some horizontal line.

dalava

You will be disappointed

canam73

It's like this:



And that works for everyone regardless of age, weight, sex and starting fitness.

Radish_legs

Now I can keep up with the local ride that does 19+mph (including stops) over about 35 miles. At the beginning I was staying completely out of the wind, and now I'm doing some of the pulling. My goal is to be able to ride with the guys that do the 20-21mph+ pace, which means riding 27mph on the flats and such. It's a pretty big jump. It's going from the fit-rec to seriously-fit. I've not been slacking during those 700 miles. But at the same time, I have not been doing regimented workouts like intervals. Just trying to ride hard. I'm just contemplating what it's going to take to be able to go on group rides with the fast guys.

caloso

Keep doing the group rides.

Radish_legs

I told my wife that I'm probably hoping that the power numbers are awesome and show wonderful potential and that's why I'm subconsciously getting the power meter. But that the reality is that the numbers will show I am awful.

Radish_legs

Reading Allen and Coggan and they say that if you are new and unfit, the gains you will get are huge and exponential, but if you are already fit then the gains will be much smaller. Talking about intensive training and using a power meter. So I guess the question is how fit can you get in 700 miles. And how many miles/effort/months/years it takes to really get fit. And how you would define that. In my case, I think I would define it as someone who could race Cat 5 comfortably.

bruce19

You will know once you have created it.

mrodgers

Texas? Just curious, what is the difference between summer shorts and t-shirts and winter shorts and t-shirts?

kevmk81

700 miles is - on average during peak training - less than what I put in for a month. The fitness I gain over 4 weeks isn't that noticeable - at least not for me. However, the fitness I gain from July -> September is highly noticeable. I think you should gauge your question on time, not distance. Some can do little mileage and do great, some need big mileage and still suck (like me). Training for one month is not going to make as much as a noticeable difference as finishing three months of training. Three months is enough for a base. I notice huge improvements from when I start each off season - December - January, to when I am ready for build - February - March. I'm pack fodder in 3/4 races. I'm not sure if comfortable is what you're looking for racing cat 5. If I'm comfortable I would probably attack the group and see if it sticks. If not, then I'd re-attach and try to blow the group up a little bit, maybe get another rider to join me in a separate attack. If you mean comfortable - safety wise - then in m opinion, you need a few months of group riding to do that. Over the years, I've noticed my gains have been less and less though. I've been riding/racing/training since 2008. Those first couple years were great! I'm just as fast now, but can do "specialty" things better, better at climbing hills, better at recovery after sprints, etc... I have lost some endurance over the past two years though due to life (15 month and 1 month old), as getting a 5 hour ride in is no longer a good idea on the weekends. 3 hour is my wife-allowable max. Did an 80 mile ride a few weeks ago and got the death stare since I was out for just about 5 hours.

wphamilton

Good point. I forgot about the initial part of the curve.

Including the very beginning it's an S-curve (aka sigmoid function), which not coincidentally describes a lot of growth processes. Such as population growths, many behavior patterns, fashion trends, segments of economic growth, and performance increases.

valygrl

If you're not going to do intervals and aren't psyched for the testing and analysis, the powermeter is just a really expensive e-wang ruler.

get the Allen & Coggan book, read it, and if you are still psyched, set yourself up a training program (which at some point will include intervals). If you are not interested in the analysis and don't want to get a coach to figure it out and tell you what to do, return the power meter, get a heart rate monitor for hundreds or thousands of dollars less, and do one of the myriad of cookie-cutter heart rate based training plans that can be found all over the place.

edit... never mind any of this, i see the real conversation is going on in the 33

Radish_legs

if u have the power meter, how useful is the HRM in addition?

BoSoxYacht

Winter in Texas sucks, almost as much as Summer in Texas.

Radish_legs

I agree. I'm in the Dallas area. And we get snow at least one day most years. And 25 degrees in Texas is accompanied with wind and humidity, that makes it feel like 10 degrees. But we do have our Indian summer weeks as well.

mrodgers

Yeah, snow one day a year would certainly be lousy. When February finally finished (shortest month of the year drags on the longest) and it finally got back up into the low 20's, I was thinking about opening up the pool last year it was so warm. What stopped me was the 4 feet of snow piled on top of the 18 inches of ice in the pool, LOL.

Only in good fun guys. I know you guys feel the cooler temps a lot worse being use to hot than us up north feel really cold temps. You guys laugh at us up north complaining about 90° in the summer so that we can laugh at you guys complaining about winter down there