Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Deconstructing 100K per month


"STOP training. Stop worrying about all the numbers. Throw all that training literature away -- it isn't written for someone 60+ years old with a fairly high resting pulse (60+), anyway. Instead, start riding and enjoying the rides for the sake of the rides."

This comment, from one of my blog posts long ago and far away, is one I think about often. Although I really appreciate the sentiment (and I appreciate that the author took the trouble to post a comment even more), each of the many times I have rethought this comment, I end up telling myself the same thing: "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that." (My name is David so when I talk to myself, I ..., oh, never mind.) Cycling inevitably involves choices, and depending on what choices I make, has consequences. How often do I ride? (A different commenter on that same post chided me for riding two days in a row.) How fast do I ride? (...and chided me for riding too fast.) For how many miles? If I am interested in a group ride, which rides are too long or too hilly and which are just right? All of that said, over the past five years, I have moved some distance in the direction this commenter suggested. Although I own a dozen books on bicycle training, these days, I only look at one, "Distance Cycling" by John Hughes and Dan Kehlenbach, the cover of which is at the top of this post. My Garmin stopped working about a year ago, so I no longer track my heart rate during a ride. But I still have choices to make, and this post is about how I am thinking about these choices at this point in my life. In particular, I am going to put this into the context of my recent goal of riding one metric century (100 kilometers or just over 60 miles) a month. This is a big step backwards from five years ago, when my goal was to complete rides twice that long with the hope of working up to even longer rides. What happened? In short, I found a 200K brevet (a bike ride of 200 kilometers or just over 120 miles) much harder than I expected, such that it seemed (and still seems) unlikely I could complete one of these a month, a prerequisite for the longer rides of which I had dreamed. My move to California pushed this dream even farther out of reach. In Texas, the 200K brevets I could ride were relatively flat. In California, they are quite hilly and therefore substantially more difficult. In short, the dream is over, 100K it is.

One more factor I need to mention is that my motives for riding are mixed. Besides "enjoying the rides for the sake of the rides", I must keep riding for my health, mental and physical, whether I enjoy it or not. And therein lies a conflict. Most of the training literature assumes you are starting at a point where you cannot complete your goal ride, and that you will work up to that goal, with no plan for sustaining that level of fitness. In particular, the exercise community builds their recommendations around the concept of a "season". At the end of one season, one quits cycling and then starts the next with a series of activities that start from no cycling and work their way back up to peak fitness. On the other hand, the medical community wants to me exercise 300 minutes a week, every week of my life. One exception to the seasonal approach of the exercise community comes from the randonneuring community in the form of the R12 award given to a randonneur who rides a 200K or longer brevet every month of the year and Hughes and Kehlenbach offer a year around, steady state training plan for earning that award. In this post, I will discuss my thoughts for adapting that plan to my goal of riding a metric century a month while meeting my medically prescribed exercise requirements. I will develop this adaptation in stages.

Original Plan: 200K/month


This is a training plan for maintaining the fitness required to ride a 124 mile bike ride (200K brevet) once a month from Hughes and Kehlenbach. This plan repeats every four weeks. Immediately after having completed a 124 mile/200K/600 minute ride, you ride the easy schedule of Week 1 to recover. You then ride the harder schedules of Weeks 2 and 3 to prepare of another 200K ride in Week 4. That 200K ride is an essential part of the training schedule, if you did not ride it every month, you would have to add some longer rides to make up for it. Of course, 200K group rides do not happen exactly every 4 weeks, so Week 3 can be deleted or duplicated within reason when brevets are more or less than four weeks apart. 

For this schedule, rides shown in green are ridden slowly, those in yellow at the speed planned for the 200K (medium), those in blue are a bit faster than the 200K (medium-fast), and  those in red are fast rides. The numbers are the length of the rides in minutes. The 600 minute ride in Week 4 is the 200K ride that is the goal for the month. The estimated time of 600 minutes comes from what Hughes and Kellenbach advise should be your time before considering advancing to a 300K ride. (For comparison, the fastest I have ever ridden a 200K is 660 minutes.)

For medical reasons, I should ride 300 or more minutes a week. The TOTAL column on the far right gives the sum of minutes ridden per month. In all except the recovery week, the 300 minutes prescribed by my doctor is reached or exceeded, and the average is well over that. However, I already know I cannot maintain a schedule of a 200K ride a month, the best I have managed is a 200K per year, which is why I am now proposing of riding half that, a 100K/month.

Scaled Down Plan: 100K/month



This is identical to the previous schedule, except that I have divided all the times by two. The problem with this schedule is that, if I were to follow it, I would get less than the medically optimum amount of exercise. Only in Week 4 do I meet my goal and the average is just over 240 minutes a week, well below my goal.

Also, the rides I can actually do on the hilly San Francisco Bay Peninsula prevent me from dividing my rides into the very discrete effort levels indicated by the above color codes. What I need to do is to substitute the rides I can actually do, each of which contains a mix of efforts, by making sure that my rides give me at least same total minutes of each effort as the above schedule.

The next schedule is designed to address these issues.

Personalized Plan: 100K/month


In this schedule, I have increased the length of some of the rides so that I now get closer to my medically prescribed 300 minutes a week.  Given that the hills where I ride mean that every ride is, by necessity, a mixture of efforts, what do the color codes in this latest plan mean? Very loosely, they are meant to convey the same things as in the previous plans; the yellow ride is my weekly long ride, which, because it is in the hills, includes a mix of efforts, but in general, is a ride on which I try to moderate my speed. Because the blue ride is shorter, I try to ride it a bit faster. The green rides are rides around my neighborhood which I try to make as easy as possible, but given that I live on a hill, even those are a bit of a mix.

What happened to the fast (red) rides? Because I live in the hills, my medium-fast (blue) and long (yellow) rides are quite strenuous going up the hills and not at all strenuous going down, so rather than a 110 minute ride being 110 minutes of medium effort, it is 14 minutes of easy effort (green), 75 minutes of medium effort (yellow), 17 minutes of medium-fast effort (blue), and 4 minutes of an effort similar in difficulty to the fast rides (red)*. Because all the rides contain some high effort hill climbing, the benefits of the red rides are provided as an unavoidable part of the other rides.

On the surface, this would appear not to add up; the previous schedule had 40-45 minutes of fast (red) rides in Weeks 2 and 3, compared to only 4 minutes of high intensity riding in a 110 minute ride. What equalizes these efforts is a few things. In the first place, the 45 minutes given for the red rides are not that many minutes of hard effort, but include warm up, cool down, and recovery between hard efforts. Thus, a 45 minute fast (red) ride actually contains only of 15 minutes of fast riding. Second, it is not just the 110 minute ride that contains some hard hills, to a greater or lesser extent, all of my rides do. I don't have the same quantitation for all the rides as I do for my 110 minute ride, but a reasonable estimate is that Week 1 of the above schedule contains 8 minutes of high intensity riding, and Weeks 2 and 3 contain 12 minutes each. Finally, note that Week 1 of the previous schedule had no red rides, so summed over the month, the previous schedule contained 30 minutes of hard (fast) riding, whereas this schedule added up to 32 minutes of hard (hilly) riding, effectively the same.

A few caveats with the above calculation are 1) The numbers are close, so if I start substituting flatter long rides for hilly ones, I may come up short on hard/fast/hilly/intense minutes. (Since most of the 100K rides I am considering are hilly, doing so would probably be a mistake anyway.) 2) It is not completely clear that riding hard up hills produces exactly the same kind of fitness as getting my heart up to the same rate by riding fast. 3) This assumes that there is "hard" and "not hard" riding. In fact, many training manuals (though not Hughes and Kehlenbach) suggest riding at different intensities to gain different kinds of fitness. This is probably getting too far into the weeds for an old, casual cyclist like me, so I will not develop scenarios around each of these, but simply note that they are in the back of my mind and might cause me to do some more traditional, fast riding on occasion. Finally, and even at the risk of getting into the weeds, I plan to revisit the question of riding at different intensities one last time in an upcoming post.

How about minutes of easy (green), medium (yellow), and medium-fast (blue) riding? The previous schedule contained 165 minutes of medium-fast riding, 630 minutes of medium riding, and 150 minutes of easy riding. This current schedule contains 170 minutes of medium-fast riding, 750 minutes of medium riding, and 380 minutes of easy riding. This certainly seems at least as good.

How does my doctor feel about all this? The medical community groups exercise levels into light, moderate, and vigorous and gives me no credit for light exercise, suggests that I should participate in 300 minutes a week of moderate exercise or 150 minutes a week of vigorous exercise, or any combination of the two. The problem is in equating my exercise levels to the three medical categories. After a lot of soul searching and poring over the various ways the medical community describes light, moderate, and vigorous exercise, I have come to the conclusion that the best thing for me to do is to describe all my rides as moderate exercise, thus the number of minutes in the TOTAL column represents the number of minutes of moderate exercise I get to report to my doctor. Even in Week 1, my recovery week, I come very close to the optimum 300 minutes of exercise, and significantly exceed that in all other weeks with an average of over 350 minutes a week. I think my doctor would be happy if I could maintain this schedule.

Despite how complicated it was to get here, this personalized schedule is designed to be simplicity itself to ride. The 30 minute easy (green) rides are just rides around my neighborhood. The 110 minute medium (blue) ride is just the "go-to" ride I ride all the time, and the longer (yellow) rides are just simple extensions to that ride. If I start to get bored, significant changes to this schedule should still leave me well prepared for a metric century, so long as I maintain the total number of minutes of riding, don't skip the long ride each week, and do roughly the same amount of riding in the hills. Finally, what happens when life intervenes such that I fail to maintain this schedule, or even stop riding altogether for a period? The consensus of the training literature suggests I should slowly work up to a long ride of between 200 and 225 minutes a week or two before the metric century, after which I could return to this maintenance schedule. The consensus of the endurance cycling (randonneuring) community would suggest that 150 minutes might be enough to prepare for a 100K, and thus once I had worked my way back to this maintenance schedule, I would be good to go. I rode the Art of Survival 8 weeks after having been completely off the bike for 10 weeks due to illness, and followed a schedule much like that recommended by the training literature, working up to a long ride of 230 minutes two weeks before the ride, and that seemed to work well. I was in something of the reverse situation for the Golden Hills metric century, being a bit overtrained seven weeks before, and in that case, rode only one long ride in preparation, 190 minutes, and that, too worked. What is the lesson from these different experiences? I think it is that, unlike a 200K ride, A 100K ride is much closer to what I can comfortably ride day in and day out, so preparing for one is a tweak to my schedule rather than a major effort that requires intense focus and a precise training plan to complete. 

Even though it is relatively easy to prepare for, the benefits of a monthly 100K should not be minimized. A 100K ride is not easy for me but rather is a welcome stretch. Thankfully, there are lots of fun group 100K rides offered in my area, providing an opportunity for making my medically-prescribed riding more entertaining. In short, 100K per month represents a worthwhile upgrade to my riding schedule. Now all that remains is to muster the organization and enthusiasm needed to sign up for metric centuries on a regular basis. Wish me luck!



* I don't normally use a heart rate monitor on my California rides, but one time I did. These levels of effort were determined from that ride.

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