Hi All, im looking for general advice in regards to trainer sessions to help prepare for doing the 300km Around the Bay in October. I know im starting probably a month late. The plan is to be able to complete the ride comfortably, not finishing in pain or severely bonked!!!
Around the bay is mainly a flat course with some climbing about 120km into the ride.
Currently im partially working from home so I can get some hour long sessions done during the week, and I am planning on doing regular long rides on the weekends.
I think you have plenty of time to prepare for October.
I would work on building your aerobic base for the 300 km. To ride it comfortably it’s going to require a very long Z2 effort. So I would work on slowly increasing the length of your weekend rides. My longest events are around 6 hours (160 km with plenty of climbing) and most of my weekend training rides are in the 3-5 hour range. I typically increase them by 30 mins each week while building toward an event. My main focus is on in-ride nutrition and efficient pacing. The longer rides basically become an eating contest!
As for trainer sessions I’m simply following the Hilly GF plan (indoor/outdoor option), which fits nicely with my event goals and weekend training rides.
Well fortunately for me the event didn’t end up going ahead due to COVID restrictions. I had also been dealing with a fair bit of back issues due to not being able to get the treatments I needed for my back again due to COVID retrictions. Pretty much all of this year has been basically a write off for any epic rides like ATB.
After having some of these set backs I am determined to try again for next years 300km ATB event. I have even upgraded my trainer from a slightly borked TACX Satori Smart (circa 2010 ish) to a JetBlack VOLT. The difference is amazing. Just in the 1.5 months I have had it there has been a noticable improvement in my on bike performace. I still have a long way to go to get back to pre-covid fitness levels.
I have been reading through the event preparation guides for both the 300km ATB ride as well as the 240km 3Peaks Ride (this one has about 2400 meters of vertical gain) and will be starting my event preparation shortly after xmas
So armed with that information I will be doing a lot more of the climbing and endurance sessions with some speed sessions thrown in. Going to be hard though sitting on the trainer at this time of year with summer just about to start for me
So the Around the Bay event has been announced as going ahead for 2022. Woohoo. I’ve since gotten rid of the JetBlack VOLT (continuous issues with bearings on it) and i’ve now got a Wahoo KICKR Core and im a lot happier with. Especially with the resistance feel and power reading on it. Feels heaps better. So now I have to get a new baseline FTP with FF.
As for training and preparing for a 300km event most of my training is going to most likely be every lunch time (working from home benefit) as we’re heading into colder and crapier weather now. Im probably also going to start getting up a little earlier to do an early morning sessions as well as a lunch time session. This is going to be the only way I can increase the time I need to do riding/training. I’ve also been trying to get out for 100km+ rides every couple of weekends, which now that winter isn’t far away for me now are going to turn into longer/multple sessions instead.
For the 300km route there is going to be a bit of climbing half way through before getting back to being flat again. Would it be more beneficial to concerntrate on edurance/speed sessions coupled with some climbing sessions?
The answer, Yes. My recommendation (and what is supported in the Sports Science literature) is do your higher intensity rides in the AM. Be sure to warm up well before blasting off into Revolver, 14 Vice Grips, or 9 Hammers! But it will be best for you to get your MAP and AC workout in 1st, and then in the afternoon do your sub-threshold, tempo, or active recovery/endurance ride.
On your overreaching days you could do a couple different combo pairs. Combo 1 could be pair AC in the AM with lower cadence MAP/Threshold workout in the afternoon. Combo 2 could be MAP in the AM with Threshold/Sub-Threshold Over-Under low cadence efforts. The AM workout allows you to get your quality in at your most fresh state (so that your quality is actually quality) and loads your legs with some fatigue. Then your afternoon workout (the less intense workout of the two sessions) is more realistic to what you will experience on the day, ie your body will know how to respond to a lower cadence hill effort in a fatigued state.
If you are doing a 2:1 plan then I would recommend only 1 over-reach session per cycle, if you are doing a 3:1 then 1-2 would be OK (you don’t need to do 2 over-reaching sessions every cycle, maybe every other or every 3rd cycle).
Thanks for the advice, glad my thinking was in the right direction.
Unfortunately im still time constricted (as well as having great difficulty in getting up early, sleep what sleep). But its a work in progress.
The colder weather is really starting to set in now as i’m heading into winter now so thats really going to play on the mental toughness and my ability to push through and keep training. Winter in Melbourne sucks at the best of times. Often it gets down to as low 2-5 degrees overnight. Which makes getting out to the trainer in the garage esepecially unpleasant in the early morning or evening.
My FTP has gone up which is good, from 224 to 234 and my other numbers have also gone up, which means each workout is a bit more intensive. Given my limited time still i am considering to manually increase my FTP, MAP and AC by about 3% or 5% so I get a bit more sufferring out of my workouts.
after having Around the Bay cancelled in 2021 I waited for the event go go ahead this. So come May when entries open I went in a registered for the 300km route and promptly started smashing out as many sessions on the trainer as I could. In the 6 months from registering to actually doing the ride I did not get as much riding in as I should have, other factors like getting sick in July with a really bad cold to getting COVID at the start of September really hampered me and COVID actually wreaking havoc with both my strength and fitness on the bike. Even with only a couple of long rides (120km+) in that 6 months somehow I managed to gain some level of fitness for the ride.
I was really happy to have actually made it to the start of the event given everything that had been going on health wise as well as the change in work circumstances. Unfortunately I did’t end up doing the full 300km due to a couple of punctures and a bad accident that happened in front of me while I was on the first leg of the ride from Melbourne out to Geelong meant that the time spent with these incidents meant that I missed the early ferries and resulted in me missing the time cutoffs for the parts of the ride that pushed it up to 300km. Which turned out to be a good thing for me as I really hadn’t done enough training.
So i ended up doing the traditional 210km route instead, and because I was sitting in behind other rides/groups for a lot of the ride I was able to conserve a lot of energy and keep the pressure off the legs. Overall I did pretty good until about 40km to go and then I kinda sorta started to bonk. The legs just couldn’t take the small up hills and the stop starts from the traffic lights, I just hadn’t had enough gels/food/drink early into to the ride or shortly after the ferry trip from Queenscliff to Sorrento. Something to address for next time.
I think i have a pretty good idea of the training i really need to do if I am going to have another crack at doing the 300km route again (which, well lets be honest, it will happen), only difference this time is that I am going to start the training sometime in november and will inlcude some virtual racing as well as what I was doing with the trainer sessions. I just hope that the kickr core of mine will take the abuse im about to through at it
Thanks for the update and that sounds like a reasonable result considering the issues and something to build on for next year.
As I mentioned in my post last year, in-ride fueling is critical on these long endurance rides and requires some experimentation and practice to find what works best for you.
A 300 km ride is relatively simple from a training plan perspective. It’s all about building a strong aerobic engine with a pacing and fueling strategy to back it up. That means you do need to be putting in a reasonable number of long steady rides of 100+ km and at least a couple of 200+ km rides to validate your nutrition strategy. While you may get away with less, you would then be guessing and hoping for the best!
