nice post. i know a lot of the time i get stuck in the "oh no slow down you HR is too High" when i should just ride for the speed.

"I feel the need, the need for speed!"

I can't. Hobbes still isn't fixed from his run in with the car. I think they said they would get the wheels and fork in this weekend. I was planning on riding my mountian bike over there tomorrow to check it out. Maybe I'll see you there when you come back.

It's not fair!!!! I want to ride my road bike!!! I hate cars. :mad:

ahh right =( We'll miss ya, but you'll be back

No, no they are going to deflate me! These Europeans are crazy cyclist, they go out in all types of conditions, have old faces, inject epo and ride by you and shout you're doing that wrong, but speed away before you can ask "what?" At least I have a month to put in hard work, so I don't go down too soon in the day.

What do you recommend hitman?

If it feels good, do it. ;)

Sometimes you just have to pitch that stinking HR Monitor and go for it.
I ride with hardcore roadies and often get dropped (and busted up a few times) but it has made me a much faster/better rider.
I swim with masters swimmers and feel like I should be wearing arm floaties, but again my speed and endurance has improved. And oh by the way, the same applies for swimming if you want to swim fast in a race you better be swimming fast in practice.
Blowing up in the swim portion is a lot worse than on the bike.
Sometimes when I run around the park, the high-school track or x-country team will be out running. I will try and keep up (super tough for me).
- T

Well said T. Like they say "One can't soar like an eagle when you stick around with turkeys" :D

Definitely more riding this year, and faster!! :D

Yes and No. It would just tell you what the HR is. If that is what you need to gauge the easy days, so be it. For hard days make them real hard days. REALLY hard. To the point of falling off the bike, especially at the end of a ride. Go all out to the point of exhaustion; till the legs will not push anymore. Then the next day make it a grandma ride and smell the roses, ride like a child and relax. Weave the bike around enjoy the wind in the hair etc. Just have fun on the light days. If you go hard on hard days you will justify the easy days. What I do on light days is if I feel the slightest lactic burn in the legs, I slow down. Works for me.

good post...made me realize that I need to hit the road and hit it hard. It also made me realize that no matter how fast I am in the marathon it's the bike that counts, even if my background is in marathon-distance running. I guess this post shows that it is about the bike (and not being a whimp)...

I like how Rich cuts through it all. I wanna go ride fast now - Hey I have a TT for the bike on the training plan for tomorrow - Yea I get to go fast!

Oh, The Slow/Smooth quote below from Rich is really for the Swim.

Strauss is my coach for 3 years now. LSD teaches you to ride slow. You need to have focus time in every ride or at least be riding at you IM pace for it to be effective. If you want to get fast, ride fast.

I am doing about 5 hours a week right now on the trainer, but there is a TON of quality work in there. During my recovery from Goofy Challenge, I was told to ride "easy." It SUCKED and it was boring. Thankfully, I only did one week of that, and then I got back to my normal training.

The thing with bike training is there is less risk of injury than if you took the same approach to run training. For running, you need to do slow and easy runs just to keep up the volume, but then to allow you to run faster on some days so you retain your speed.

For biking though, you can recover from hard rides much faster, and so you pay less of a penalty for spending more time close to your LTHR (or FT watts, if you train by power). If you want to go fast for a long distance, you practice going fast (hard). If you've got 40' to ride, warm up for 5-10' then ride hard for 30' and a short cooldown.

The one thing missing from the above discussion is recovery. If you ride both HARD AND FAR, then you DO need to watch your recovery.

Now all of this needs to be taken in the context of an athlete's current abilities. You DO need to build an endurance base over a few years, but once you've done that, you can almost toss out the idea of "base building" in the off season. Off season is a great time to do shorter, more quality (read faster) work in all 3 disciplines. Then as you get to racing season, you add more endurance just to get what you had back. Then you are there, ready to race.

When I hear someone's coach told them to ride 3 hours on the trainer "as you feel," I tend to think that is poor coaching. Other than driving yourself insane, what is the purpose of that session?

And this is the core of purposeful training. Each workout has a purpose. If you are just "working out" and don't know why you are doing what you are doing, you are probably wasting a lot of time. Unless you are a first to second-year triathlete who needs to build an endurance base, or you are moving up in distance from short to long course racing, there should be very little of your training time that is just "putting in the time."

YMMV

Yes, there is a component of endurance to biking, too, the point is that you can't just slog through lots of LSD training on the bike and expect to get faster.