Training for the Golden Hills

Left to right, Dave, Roger, and The Zombie, at the lunch stop of the 2019 Golden Hills Metric Century.

Last year, I posted a detailed description of the Golden Hills Metric Century* with lots of pictures. I heartily recommended the ride back then, and this year I enthusiastically repeat that recommendation. If you want a description of The Golden Hills Metric Century, look at that older post. In this post, I will be talking about the new training plan I tried for preparing for this ride and how this year's ride went for me.

My goal for the 2019 Golden Hills Metric Century was to have a comfortable ride from beginning to end. I came up with that goal after having a miserable finish in the 2019 Art of Survival Metric Century, and then looking back, realizing that I had ended up more or less miserable by the end of the all three metric centuries (100Ks) I have ridden since moving to California in 2017. The only thing I could think to try was to vary my training, to try to come up with a training plan for a 100K that worked better than what I had done before.

The standard plan given in many cycling books to prepare for a long ride (typically a century) is to increase the length of the longest ride each week by 10% until you reach a distance equal to 67% to 75% the distance of the challenge ride (e.g. 67 to 75 miles for a century) two weeks before the challenge. That is what I did the two times I prepared for 200 kilometer (124 mile) rides in 2012 and 2013, and that is what I did to prepare for my first 100K after moving to California, the 2018 Art of Survival Metric Century. So why mess with this widely accepted strategy? A number of reasons:

1. As noted above, I found the 2018 Art of Survival Metric Century hard despite following the standard plan.
2. I frequently suffer from overtraining, a build-up of fatigue which causes my performance to get worse with training rather than better, especially since moving to California. To prevent that, I am looking for something easier than the standard plan.
3. The standard plan is, strictly speaking, designed for one challenge ride a year. Might I be able to repeat it twice in the same year, say six months apart? Maybe, but it certainly isn't designed for riding a 100K a month, what I am trying to do.
4. Way back in 2012, when I first started reading about preparing for 200 kilometer and longer rides as part of the sport of randonneuring, I came across riders who had very minimal training protocols, often with the long ride of each week being, not 10% longer than the previous ride, but 100% longer (twice as long.) That is, these riders would have as their longest training ride a 100 kilometer ride a week or two before their first 200 kilometer brevet (challenge ride.) It seems that real world cyclists don't always follow the standard plan.

If the standard plan anticipates one challenge ride (e.g. a 100K) a year, what does the exercise community recommend for someone who wants to do a 100K a month? What first endeared me to the book "Distance Cycling" by Hughes and Kehlenbach^ was that it had an answer to that very question. Specifically, it had a plan for riding a 200 kilometer ride every month. This is not a plan for the meager 100K I was attempting, but it seemed a simple matter to scale their plan down for 100K, and that is what I did. (I have posted a long, detailed description of this scaled down plan.) However, a key component of the Hughes and Kehlenbach plan (and of my version) is that I have to actually ride that 100K each month; it is not only the goal for the month, but also an essential part of the training program for the next month. So what was I to do if for some reason I couldn't ride a 100K one month? Other than the 100K itself, the longest ride in this plan is 55 kilometers,  more than half of a metric century. I remembered those randonneurs who were increasing their weekly mileage by factors of two, and thought, "That might be OK. Don't worry about a missed 100K, you have enough preparation anyway." So that's what I did for my next two 100K's, the 2018 Golden Hills 100K and the 2019 Art of Survival 100K. It sort of worked, I finished both these rides, but they were painful by the end, especially the 2019 Art of Survival. However, given how much trouble I was having with overtraining, I was nervous about the 10% a week plan which, if followed strictly, would have required 6 to 7 weeks of increasingly hard rides to get ready for a 100K. And then Coach John Hughes (of Hughes and Kehlenbach) made the suggestion that older riders like me might be better off skipping every other long ride in the standard plan. That is, rather than doing a ride 10% longer every week, do a ride 20% longer every other week, so that is what I tried. Here is the training plan I used for the 2019 Golden Hills 100K:

The rides in blue are shorter rides ridden at a speed slightly harder than I expect to ride in the 100K. The rides in green are ridden at an easy pace. The rides in yellow are the rides that get increasingly longer. The highlighted yellow ride in the lower right corner of the figure is the Golden Hills Metric Century for which I was training. I have idealized this diagram a bit, e.g. by moving rides by a day or two to make them line up for clearer presentation. I present the length of rides in miles rather than the more modern minutes because I think that better shows my intentions.

Two questions raised by my plan: What kind of riding was I doing to be ready to start this program? Why are the increases between the longest rides more than 20%? My normal riding schedule is four rides a week with the longest ride being 23 miles, but as I have posted here before, life happens, and that makes my riding more erratic than I might like. The week before starting this program, I did no riding at all. I had a houseguest who did not ride, so we hiked instead. The two weeks before that I did no ride longer than 11 miles. The reasons were that my younger son was getting married which was most definitely one of the high points of my life but did disrupt my cycling, and as luck would have it, I was also fighting off a cold, so I decided discretion was the better part of valour and rode less. However, seven weeks before starting this schedule, I rode The Death Ride, one of the hardest rides of my life, and surely some of the fitness from that carried forward. All of that said, this is not my first rodeo, I have been through such disruptions many times before, and have a pretty good idea how quickly my body loses fitness and how quickly I can get back to my usual schedule. I also know that going from my usual 23 mile ride to a similar 34 mile ride represents an easy transition for me, despite being an almost 50% increase in miles. (I think the 20% increase limitation is less relevant at these low mileages.) The last two increases are about 25% when the plan calls for 20% increases. My intuition told me that this was close enough, and the results indicate that my intuition was right.

So how did it go? I have never had a training plan work better, so that went very well indeed. As to how the ride went, that is a bit more complicated. Stress was a big factor for this ride. After having done so badly in the Art of Survival last May, it was very important to me that I redeem myself, so the seven weeks of training for this ride were as stressful as I have ever found a training program. For some reason I found the logistics of organizing the trip (arranging a hotel, etc.) stressful and as a result, I had trouble sleeping the two nights before the ride, so went into the ride with sleep deprivation. As an experiment, I tried carrying my bike in the trunk with the wheels off rather than on on the bike rack and fussing with the bike the morning of the ride was another stressor. I got delayed a bit at the start and everyone was much faster than I, so I was alone from the beginning and I was worried about staying on route. Maybe because of all this stress, I started feeling tired early on the ride, which made me wonder if I would fail in my goal of having a comfortable ride, or perhaps even not be able to finish at all. And finally there was Roger and Dave.

Roger and Dave? Roger is my good friend from high school with whom I stay when I ride Art of Survival, and with whom I have ridden my three previous metric centuries. Dave is his brother in law and cycling buddy. I was at Eroica California 2019 with Roger and Dave, but did not ride with them because we rode different routes, so I have never ridden with Dave. But Roger and Dave ride together a lot, and Roger tells me they are pretty evenly matched, so I kind of knew what to expect from Dave. I totally love riding with Roger, it is one of the biggest attractions of my 100K rides. However, there is a problem: Roger is a much faster rider than I am. We had discussed our 100K plans for the year, and Golden Hills was not on Roger's list, so I thought I would be doing it alone. I knew I would really miss him, but not having him there would give me the opportunity to ride at my own pace. Besides training, another important factor in finishing a ride comfortably is how you ride it, pacing being an important part of that. And then, at the last minute, Roger and Dave decided to come. I was overjoyed! I was so looking forward to seeing them. On the other hand, I was also a bit worried. Would trying to keep up with them throw off my pacing? The solution to that problem was that Roger and Dave's ambitions had grown; they were riding not the 65 mile 100K, but the full 100 mile century. Interestingly, my 100K and their century traversed similar routes. Relative to my 100K their century had a 15 mile extension about 20 miles into my ride and a 20 mile extension at about 55 miles into my ride, so a plan was hatched. Because I do better when I start slow and increase my effort as I go along, I would not try to keep up with them at the beginning of the ride. By the time we got to the lunch stop (40 miles into my ride), they would have ridden 15 miles more than me, so their longer route should more or less cancel out my slower pace and we could regroup. At that point I would be fully warmed up and I would try to stay on their wheels until our routes diverged again near the end of my ride. They started a bit late, and we agreed I would go on ahead because they were going to pass me anyway. I have already described how grumpy I was at the beginning of the ride, but it was even worse than I said. The roads were in poor repair, the traffic heavy and on and on. I knew this was all my mood, and fantasized about posting a second review of Golden Hills, a review of Golden Hills while in a Bad Mood to balance out my review from last year, Golden Hills while in a Good Mood. And then Roger and Dave caught up to me. We rode together for a few minutes before they rode off into the distance, and it was as if the clouds had parted, letting in the sun. All of a sudden, the ride was good. My mood dropped a bit when they left, but not to its previous low. I started enjoying the ride more and found a bit more strength and started picking up my pace. We regrouped at the lunch stop, and then we started off together. It took me to the limit of my ability to stay on their wheels, but I found strength I didn't know I had and experienced the joy of catching up to and even passing other riders rather than having everyone pass me. There were many moments when I felt that there was no way I could keep up with them until the divergence of our two routes, but I did, and took great satisfaction in that accomplishment.

But how did I do objectively? Did I accomplish my goal of having a comfortable ride from beginning to end? I have already answered the second question, there were moments of unpleasantness at the beginning of the ride, so no, I did not have a comfortable ride from beginning to end. But maybe that was the wrong way to express my real goal. Maybe I should have described my goal as to "not fall apart at the end of the ride", and that goal I accomplished. Objectively, my performance on the ride was almost exactly the same as last year, with an average speed of 13.3 miles per hour, quite good for me. (As an objective measure of how much faster Roger is than me, he rode more miles than I did and averaged 15.3 miles per hour.) But last year I only trained one week for the ride, as opposed to three hard weeks this year, doesn't that make last year's training plan better? When I was imagining this ride, thinking Roger would not be there pushing my pace, I was expecting that it would be slower but more comfortable this year. The fact that I rode this year at the same average speed but much more comfortably than last year is a big improvement in my opinion.

So what did I learn? I certainly learned that my new training protocol works well for me (thank you, Coach John Hughes) but I also relearned of some things of which I needed reminding. I was reminded of the power of mood and the impact it can have on the quality of the ride. The beginning of my ride was miserable only because I had gotten myself into a bad mood. I was reminded that although I am an introvert, I do benefit from social interactions. The improvement in my mood when Roger and Dave passed me was startling in its intensity. When I restarted cycling back in 2008, I did a lot of riding with my wife, who sadly is no longer with me. Since moving to California, I have done most of my cycling alone. I am now wondering if I would be happier if I joined a club so I can ride with others more often, and I am actively looking into that.

In summary, I am very pleased with my new training protocol. It got me better prepared for a 100K than ever before while not driving me into overtraining. That said, I never actually evaluated the "100K a month" plan I developed so meticulously (I will discuss why in a future post) so I would still like to give that approach a try. Stay tuned.

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* The official title of the ride is the Golden Hills Century. This event features a Century (101 mile ride), Metric Century (65 mile ride), and other ride lengths as well. Strictly speaking, a century is 100 miles and a metric century is 100 kilometers or 62 miles, but in practice it is hard to design a route that hit these mileages exactly, so a century is greater than and approximately equal to 100 miles and a metric century is greater than and approximately equal to 62 miles.

^ I have posted several times about this book, so I wanted to link to one of those posts here. Normally that would have been the first post in which I reviewed this book, but back then, I underappreciated it. Over time, this book has really grown on me such that it currently is almost the only training book I use.