What is the best way to train for doing 3 days in a row? I am doing a charity ride in June, and I can cycle 70 miles, but I haven't ever done it day after day.

The tour is as follows:

Day 1 - 70 miles
Day 2 - 70 miles
Day 3 - 50 miles

All I ever read is "ride and recover", making sure your body is correctly fuelled and given the longest amount of recovery time. All the basics really.

Is the trick just fitness - ride 100 miles as often as possible, and that will make 70 miles seem easier on the body?

ANY ADVICE WELCOME - if you've done a 3 day in a row ride, please tell me your hints, tips and experience.

Commute on a bike -- it'll get you used to riding every day, sore or not.

Throw in a long (50-75 mile) weekend ride, and an after-work ride once a week, to get used to time in the saddle.

But the most important point is how you ride the tour. It's not a race, unless you decide to make it one. I like the description a Brit came up with for a century, roughly: "Ride 25 miles, stop for tea, repeat four times. You're done." Get off the bike for a while (5-30 minutes), rest your weary sit-bones, stop and smell the flowers / talk with the locals. You may get sore, but with a little luck you'll be able to complete the ride and have great tales to tell!

IMHO, unless you are racing, I don't think length of an individual ride is quite as important as the number of rides and the average length of a ride. My average ride is around 30 miles. My longest single ride in a year might be 60 miles. After doing a century, I feel good enough to get on the bike the next day and do 25-30 miles.

Ride-day preparation is also important. If you let yourself get dehydrated on day #1, day #2 and day #3 will not be good regardless of how well you prepared. Same for fueling yourself. Eat well and eat right.

Since you’ve done 70 that can help with the mental part. Having a training plan has always worked best for me. I’d work out a training program designed for riding several consecutive days. A simple one could be building a base with steady high spin easy riding during the week, then start adding strength building mixing short sustained effort sprints and hills balanced with easy rides into the weekly plan and then decreasing the strength building and adding longer rides, up to say 75% of your final goal, once or twice a week to build endurance, help condition your muscles and get your body used to extended periods on a bike and finally ride consecutive day rides of 50 or so miles over the same kind of terrain as your June ride and a couple of weeks before. Decrease training to rest your muscles the week before but keep your calorie intake up to build your fuel. Keeping your training rides in the weekly 10%- increase area should help you design the timeline of your plan from where you are now physically. Rest and recovery time is important to include in your plan. Some body weight exercises to build core strength will help greatly too. Eat well and use more complex carbs to keep up with increasing demands for energy. Try different foods and drinks during your training rides to find out what works best for you and stay with that during the June ride.

Just enjoy the challenge, the June ride no matter how long it takes you and meeting kindred souls of the charity on the ride!!! It may even lead to joining Audax UK

Much of the year, I ride 5-6 days a week ... so I often ride 3 days in a row. So do many other cyclists.

Just go out and start riding. We don't know where you're currently at with cycling, but say you're comfortable with a 20 mile ride, go ride 20 miles tomorrow, 20 miles the next day, and 20 miles the following day. Take a day off, and then repeat 20 miles 3 days in a row again. Day off and repeat. Then up it to 25 miles.

The day after your 70 mile ride you might wake up stiff and sore and wonder how you could do it again today. In your training when this happens be sure to get out and go for an easy recovery ride. Go slow and don't go too long. You'll find that you can break through some of the rust and soreness, although you still won't be as fresh as on day one. But soon your second day recovery ride will become just another day in the saddle. Just don't get into the habit of going all out on one day and then feeling like you're too beat to ride at all the next day. Get out and at least do that recovery ride.

You don't need to " train" specifically to do this. The "ride and recover" advice is good, but applies mainly to those who are incurring high levels of training stress in order to get faster. If you are prepared to take your time, successive days of 70 miles are not a problem. I've often toured at an average of c. 60 miles per day for weeks at a time, and because I've just been bimbling along, I have found it very comfortable.

This is good training advice for this sort of ride. Remember that commuters regularly ride 3 or 4 or 5 days in a row. Sometimes the commute is relatively short, but some commuters have quite lengthy commutes.

If you can't commute to and from work every day for some reason, get out for a 15-25 mile evening ride 3-4 days a week, and then do back-to-back longer rides on the weekend.

Maybe everyone's different, but I used to commute to work by bike 5 days a week and it didn't work out too well for me. The furthest I ever got was on that schedule was, I think, 25 miles. No time for recovery means you're neither gaining performance nor endurance.

On the other hand, regular hard rides spaced 48-72 hours apart help you improve your fitness levels and eventually allow you to bring them closer together.

Here's the most consecutive riding I ever managed, after 2 months of "ride and recover":

4/14 116 miles
4/15 rest
4/16 12 miles
4/17 23 miles
4/18 rest
4/19 91 miles
4/20 4 miles
4/21 rest
4/22 77 miles
4/23 rest
4/24 15 miles
4/25 36 miles
4/26 20 miles
4/27 13 miles
4/28 108 miles
4/29 19 miles
4/30 21 miles

At the beginning of 2 months I used to find it hard to walk up the stairs the day after the ride. By the end, I did a 11-hour mountain ride on 4/28 and I felt well enough to go on another ride 24 hours later.

How long was your commute?

When I was heavily into Randonneuring I commuted 13.6 km round trip, 4-5 days a week, plus some evening rides (on Wednesdays I aimed to ride anywhere from 50 to 80 km), and then I did long rides on the weekend. I would definitely take a day or two off after a randonnee for recovery, before starting my regular commute again.

When my commute grew to 70 km round trip, I could only manage that 3x per week, at most, plus long rides on the weekend.


So ... 7 days in a row is your longest consecutive stretch of riding? Have you only done that once?

I like to do several 8-10 day stretches during a summer ... part of that is because I hate passing up good weather.

I've known people, including an employee of mine, who made hilly commutes totaling 32-35 miles/day, 5 days a week. The secret to a commute like that is a recovery drink containing both carbs and protein at the end of each leg. Otherwise, one gets run down. Similarly, when touring our practice is to have a beer as soon as possible, then dinner with carbs and protein some short time after.

Of course one wants to limit effort when touring to spare oneself for the following day, but sometimes that doesn't work so well, what with hills and mountains, etc.

I think the best training is to ride both weekend days, about the same mileage each day. Go moderate the first day, hard the second. Recovery ride the next day, then back to normal daily training with shorter, easier rides.

Building weekly mileage is the trick. You're looking at riding 190 miles in three days. If you can do that in seven for a few weeks, you'll be able to do it in three once, because you'll do a rest week before the tour.

My commute was 15-20 minutes one way, plus trips to grocery stores, plus longer weekend trips, for about 6 months. You were in San Diego recently, right? Imagine living in San Diego without a car.

The above was just an example of what can be achieved in 2 months of "ride and recover". I usually don't ride every day. It's a tradeoff between intensity and frequency. I do have to work and I have limited time during the week (especially now that it gets dark by 4:30 pm), I prefer to spend it on high intensity rides.

I lived in Winnipeg for 6 years without a car ... we were in San Diego and it seemed delightfully warm compared with Winnipeg.

I lived in Moscow for 4 years without a car! It may be not as cold as Winnipeg, but it's pretty cold. On the other hand, in Moscow, I had zero need for a car or a bike. My daily "commute" was 500 ft. one way and there were two grocery stores along the way. And the only climbing I ever had to do was to the fifth floor of the apartment building. San Diego was a very different story.

Well, my commutes in Winnipeg were 20 minutes each way in the summer, and 30 minutes each way in the winter. Very managable, and not really long enough. So I'd often go do at least a 20 km loop I liked in the evenings.

Look, in my case, if I was going to do a 1200K randonnee (1200K in 90 hours or less (3.5 days), including all breaks), I had to be able to ride a lot, many days in a row.

So to the OP ... thousands of people do 1200K randonnees. If they can do that, it'll be OK to ride 3 days or more in a row while you train for your event.

Much depends on the intensity. It's perfectly possible to recover adequately overnight if you're riding in zones 1 and 2 most of the time. My longest commute was 29 miles each way. i did it, on average, four days per week for a year and rode at the weekend too, so my average weekly mileage was c.300. I can assure you that I did gain both in speed and endurance. Had I been training for racing, though, I'd have increased the intensity and probably had three, rather than two, rest days per week.

On my last long tour I averaged 60 miles per day, 6 days per week, for two months. I was in great shape at the end and had no symptoms of fatigue. Of course, I wasn't in any great hurry.

That's just it ... many cycletourists ride at least 3 days in a row. I did a 3-month cycling tour in Australia back in 2004, and generally rode 4-5 days in a row, then took a day off, then 4-5 days in a row, etc.

Here's an analogy from weight training.

If you want to develop upper body strength (because you need to carry heavy boxes at work every day, or something), the correct procedure is to hit the gym and to work out to exhaustion twice a week ("ride and recover"). Over time, you become able to lift heavier and heavier boxes (ride faster), or to move more boxes in one day (ride further), or both.

If, instead of doing that, you stick to carrying boxes at work, but limit yourself to lighter stuff ("zones 1 and 2"), you will see some gains but they will be small and it will take forever.

If you try to move heaviest boxes you can find every day, you will be fatigued and you will start losing fitness.

But if you stick to a proper twice-a-week procedure and maintain proper nutrition, eventually you can develop levels of fitness that will put most others to shame (ride 60 miles/day / 6 days/week).

Cycling is not radically different, except that workouts can be closer. With weights, 72 hours is normally the bare minimum, in cycling, 48 is usually OK (in my experience). Also, I don't remember any studies reporting that more than 4 workouts/week is good for you.
What it comes down to for the OP, is whether he wants to be able to ride his tour by spring, or if he wants to follow Machka's strategy and get there through 6 years of commuting.

Weight training is quite different from cycling. I used to be a body builder, I trained quite intensely with a coach for 2 years. Yes, with weight training, you do want to arrange your workouts so that you've got 72 hours of recovery time because of the intensity at which you are working ... you're doing the reps to failure.

When I worked out, my coach divided my workouts into three. Day 1 - legs, abs, cardio. Day 2 - back, biceps, abs, cardio. Day 3 - shoulders, triceps, chest, abs, cardio. Day 4 - off (although I could go for a walk or light bicycle ride if I wanted). Day 5 - back to the legs etc. again. That kind of training gave the various muscles time to rest in between the workouts.

But with cycling you don't have to do that ... cycling is not always that intense. It's more about cardio and endurance, especially the kind of training we're talking about here. I've been cycling avidly for 23 years now ... I've been a randonneur for 12 of those years ... I've toured quite extensively ... I've commuted regularly ... and I've raced. I've got a reasonable idea of what can work.

Many cyclists, myself included, regularly ride 5-6 days a week. It is generally considered a good idea to take at least one day off each week, and it is generally considered a good idea to mix up the rides so that you do a couple long ones, a couple shorter more intense ones (ride hills, ride intervals, ride at a faster speed), and at least one recovery ride.

If the OP starts riding a relatively short distance (whether it is a commute, or an after-work ride) 3-4 days a week, and does back-to-back longer rides on the weekends, as I suggested in Post #8, he'll be ready to roll in a couple months. He has already done 70 mile rides in the past, so he should have a reasonable fitness level to work with. I suspect he could go out now this coming weekend and ride 40 miles on Saturday, and then 30 miles on Sunday, and then 20 miles on Monday ... at a long, steady distance pace ... and feel just fine.

This site is a good resource for distance training ... in particular, scroll down to the training section ...
https://www.ultracycling.com/old/siteindex.html

For example, this might be one to look at. It is about training for double centuries, which is a little longer than you (BionicChris) plan to do, but it explains what I said in my post above a bit more ... about riding a couple long rides, a couple intense rides, at least one recovery ride, and at least one day off each week.
https://www.ultracycling.com/old/trai..._training.html


The articles I linked above come from the old site's archives. On the new site, there are even more articles about training, nutrition etc.
This is the new UMCA site: https://www.ultracycling.com/

However cycling conditioning is almost completely a story of miles per week. Intensity takes care of itself. The idea is very simple: build mileage at a rate of 10% per week. That sounds very slow, but it won't take long for it to get away from you. Be sure to ride hills at about the same number of feet of climbing per mile of horizontal as the tour will be.

Cycling is radically different from weight-training. Cycling at the intensities I am talking about is almost exclusively an aerobic activity, that causes far less damage to the muscle fibres than does lifting heavy weights. Consequently it is perfectly possible to develop endurance (and build some speed, as a by-product) by doing long, steady distance day after day.

If you want to win races, you'll need to build in more intensive interval-based workouts. They certainly do require longer recovery times, though not necessarily complete rest - the pros will usually ride for several hours at low intensities on the "rest" days in a grand tour, for example, because doing so is actually better for recovery than is staying immobile.

The OPcan already ride 70 miles. He's asking what he needs to do to be able to ride that distance for three successive days. The answer is, nothing, except ride more on successive days. To compare his training needs with those of a weight trainer is absurd.

One possible structure the OP could do is this ...

Saturday - 40 miles
Sunday - 30 miles
Monday - 20 miles
Tuesday - off
Wednesday - hill repeats
Thursday - recovery ride
Friday - off

Saturday - 45 miles
Sunday - 35 miles
Monday - 25 miles
Tuesday - off
Wednesday - intervals
Thursday - recovery ride
Friday - off

And gradually increase the weekend distances. If the OP is struggling a bit with one particular weekend, repeat that weekend the next weekend rather than increasing. Within about 2 months the OP will be ready to ride the tour.

But of course, there are many different structures the OP could choose to follow. This would work as well ...

Saturday - 40 miles
Sunday - 30 miles
Monday - off
Tuesday - hill repeats
Wednesday - recovery ride
Thursday - intervals
Friday - recovery ride

Saturday - 45 miles
Sunday - 35 miles
Monday - off
Tuesday - hill repeats
Wednesday - recovery ride
Thursday - intervals
Friday - recovery ride


One structure I've used to prepare for centuries and randonneuring events, and it worked for me, goes something like this ...

(From my Century Tips article: https://www.machka.net/articles/century.htm )

Saturday - long ride
Sunday - long ride
Monday - short, light ride
Tuesday - intervals or hill repeats
Wednesday - medium distance, but intense ride
Thursday - off
Friday - medium distance, light ride

Thanks for the comments, sorry for not dropping in sooner but I've been riding and working most of the time since this thread began.

I was able to do 50 miles with 2500feet of climbing and do 20 miles the next day. I'm currently able to do the same amount but feel up to 40 miles the next day at an easier pace. I am a big guy (6ft 4, 190lbs) so I intend to drop 12lbs over the next 3-4 months and do a lot of hill repeats when time is short.

Ill be checking out links provided and working hard on my weaknesses - I want to do a century soon and once I do that there won't be any mental blocks come the big ride.

Sounds like you're well on your way.