Most comprehensive training plans provided by coaches assume a training season. In the winter, the athlete does not ride. Once the weather is good enough for riding, they go through an increasing progression of training phases. An important reason for this seasonality is that winter weather makes cycling difficult to impossible in many parts of the country. Because virtually all my cycling has been done in Texas and California where winter weather is quite compatible with cycling, I always assumed that this seasonality did not apply to me. Consistent with that, the randonneuring club I belonged to in Texas did have a year around riding schedule. However, when I look back at my training data accumulated since my move to California, I see a pretty clear pattern of reduced cycling in December and January, so maybe my recent cycling is more seasonal than I realized. Why is that? I think there are three reasons:
1) I ride more when I am training for an event like a group ride, and as I have previously blogged, these occur in a very seasonal pattern.
2) Winter is the rainy season in California. It is also colder, though certainly not cold by national standards. I confess that both of those discourage me from riding.
3) Like most people, I am more likely to get some kind of viral infection in the winter. Thus the deliberately ambiguous title to this post, Under the Weather, refers both to the actual weather (rain) and feeling less than terrific for any of a multitude of reasons.
When and why do I feel less than terrific, and what impact does that have on my training? Illness, such as the usual seasonal viral infections (cold, flu, etc.) are one obvious cause of feeling less than terrific. I don’t ride at all when I am actually sick, but even after my symptoms are mostly gone, I continue to feel under the weather and that affects my riding. There are other things that also make me feel under the weather, things like stress, lack of sleep, etc. Recently, my back problems, which I first blogged about way back in 2013, have gotten worse at the same time I have had some dental problems and these have left me feeling under the weather. Whatever the cause, when I feel under the weather I have been compromising between not riding at all and attempting to keep up my full schedule by riding a bit less and a bit slower. In short, how much or how hard I ride ranges from not riding at all when I have a fever or other overt symptoms of an illness to riding easier and shorter rides when I don’t have an actual illness but am feeling under the weather to riding as far and as fast as I can when I am feeling great.
Back when I lived in San Carlos, I would take it easy by riding my Neighborhood route rather than my Alpine route. When I first moved to Emerald Hills, I had trouble finding an easy route like that Neighborhood route to ride at times when I am feeling under the weather. During the first winter after that move, in December of 2020, I set up a trainer in my bedroom to both provide an easy ride and a ride that I could do in bad weather. One limitation of that trainer is that it is incredibly boring; I found that a 30 minute ride is the longest I can tolerate on a regular basis.
Riding less is both easy to do and easy to quantitate, I can do fewer rides or shorter rides and accumulate fewer minutes of riding per week. Riding less-hard is easy to understand in theory but is harder to quantitate. Sure, my Neighborhood ride felt easier than my Alpine ride, but how much easier, and how did that compare to rides on my Trainer? In July of 2022 I began using my TranyaGo heart rate monitor to track my rides. I have already posted about this twice and I plan to post about this again but very briefly I have been able to use the TranyaGo to measure that Intensity. What are the units of Intensity? Coaches use Training Zones to quantitate Intensity. Different coaches use different training zones. The coach I follow, Coach John Hughes, uses seven zones named 1 through 6 and a seventh zone named “Sprint.” Zone 1 rides are the easiest and Sprint is the hardest. Besides coaches, the medical community is interested in Intensity and uses a three zone system with Zones named Light, Moderate, and Vigorous. Each of these zones can be associated with a heart rate and that is where my TranyaGo comes into the picture, it allows me to associate each ride with a Zone and thus a quantitative measure of Intensity.
Recently, my two most common rides have been on my trainer and on the Cañada route . Either of these can be ridden at a range of Intensities but most commonly, I ride the Trainer at a heart rate that makes it a Zone 1 ride on the Coach Hughes scale while at the same time as a Moderate Zone on the medical scale, and the Cañada ride as a Hughes Zone 2 ride. The Cañada ride is almost entirely on very low traffic, safe-feeling, roads that go through beautiful scenery and this has become my most common ride on the road. The main limitation of this ride is that it is relatively short, 17 miles and about 95 minutes long. Plus, if I did nothing but that ride, it would inevitably become boring, so when I am feeling up to it, I do the occasional longer ride as well. My pattern has become to ride on my trainer three days a week, on the Cañada route two days a week, and to vary the sixth ride each week based on how I am feeling and what I am trying to accomplish. As noted above, when I am actually ill I don’t ride at all and if I am feeling really tired or the weather is really bad I might do only trainer rides but my typical range is the above, varying my training load with that sixth ride each week, going from a fourth trainer ride to a third Cañada ride to a 22 mile/120 minute Alpine ride to a 33 mile/170 minute Alpine-Cañada ride to a 45 mile/240 minute Stephens-Alpine ride.
What kinds of things am I trying to accomplish and how does that affect my training schedule? As always, I have two general goals, maintaining my health and keeping fit so that I can quickly prepare for a Metric Century or other group ride when one becomes available, maintaining my health being the more important of the two. From the perspective of preparing for group rides, the training pattern I have described above is rather strange in the number of Trainer rides it includes, not so much that they are on the Trainer but the kinds of rides I choose to do on the trainer, that is, short Zone 1 rides. In the context of the training literature in general and Coach John Hughes in particular, these are called Recovery Rides, rides that don’t build fitness but rather facilitate the recovery from harder rides. In that context, three or four such rides a week is unheard of, no coach I have ever encountered recommends more than two recovery rides a week (some recommend none) and Coach Hughes recommends at least one but no more than two such rides a week. Why am I doing so many? It is in service to reaching my Health goals during a week when I am feeling under the weather, it is a low stress way to accumulate the 300 minutes of Moderate-Intensity exercise a week the medical community recommends.
How are these extra “recovery” rides on my Trainer affecting my training? I don’t know, and I haven’t found any coach who has addressed this, but my guess is that two of these a week are helpful and the effects of the third or fourth are small. Because, according to the medical community, these third and fourth rides are beneficial to my health, it seems at least possible that they marginally help my fitness as well.
One final point concerns the recommendation of all coaches that it is important to train at a range of different Intensities. If I take everything above literally, my cycling would include only Intensities of Zone 1 and Zone 2. Coach Hughes recommends that all riders include some Zone 3 riding in their schedule and suggests higher intensities are beneficial to most riders as well. In the first place, my “pure” Zone 2 rides are not all that pure, truth be told, at least some of each ride ends up being at higher intensity. But to the extent my training goes according to plan, I should plan to add in some higher intensity riding. Shortly after I started using my TranyaGo, I felt like pushing on an Alpine ride and ended up riding it entirely in Zone 3. Quite some time ago, I blogged about the Tamarack Sprint, a way I can do Zone 6 rides. Finally, I have been trying some Sprint Intervals on my trainer. Including more rides like these in my schedule is something I hope to do going forward.
