The spiral is a powerful metaphor for one way to build understanding. A spiral is very much like a circle but whereas going around in circles is a waste of time, spiraling towards an understanding, while similarly revisiting the same issues again and again, provides increasing understanding of those issues with each turn of the spiral. In that spirit, I am going to re-review an eBook by the coach I currently follow, Coach John Hughes, "Intensity Training: Using Relative Perceived Exertion, a Heart Rate Monitor or Power Meter to Maximize Training Effectiveness" (hereafter referred to as Intensity Training.) I first reviewed this book almost five years ago.
When I restarted cycling in 2008, I chose my rides without a lot of theory behind that choice. I just picked a length of ride based on what I had been riding recently. On average, that produced an upward trajectory: “Of course I can complete a 40 mile ride, I did a 35 mile ride last week.” However, when I first tried to train for a 200K (126 mile) ride with the Houston Randonneurs, that very casual system broke down. As I have previously blogged, my wife came to my rescue by getting me "The Complete Book of Long Distance Cycling.” From that book I learned to increase the length of my longest weekly ride by 10% a week and to work up to a longest training ride of between 67% and 75% of the length of the event for which I was training. To this day, I believe these are the two most important things I needed to know about training for a long ride. That said, I think I can do better. Even back in 2012 I had three questions:
- What level of fitness do I need to reach before starting a training program for a Century?
- How fast should the rides in a Century program be ridden, especially during the weekly ride ominously labeled “brisk?”
- Having finished an event, what do I do to get ready for the next event? How do I fit the very focused schedule I had just completed into a year around cycling routine?
When I reviewed Intensity Training five years ago it was to answer the second question, how fast should I be riding during each of my weekly rides? In this post I am revisiting that same book to attempt to answer the first and third questions, how much fitness do I need to have to begin such a program and how do I fit a training plan focused on one long ride into my year-round cycling schedule? As it happens, I stumbled across surprising information relevant to the second question as well, but I will save discussion of that for a future post.
Hughes divides the year into four training periods:
- Pre-season: Reduce Fatigue, Improve Heath and General Fitness (2-3 months)
- Base Period: Increase Endurance (3-4 months)
- Build Period: Increase Power (1-2 months)
- Main Season: Achieve Goals (3-6 months long)
(This division is very similar to those provided by most other coaches.) Hughes also recommends taking a week off between each of these seasons and taking two to four weeks off at the end of the Main Season before starting over the next year by circling back to Pre-season.
Intensity Training provides mostly general, conceptual advice for these four seasons, it lacks the examples I find so helpful. However, it links to four other of Hughes’ eBooks promising that the examples I was looking for would be found therein. So I purchased and read those four books. They did not provide all the examples I wanted and I still have some questions but, between them, they did help a lot and the result is the figure at the top of the post where, as best I could, I integrated all the information I could find to develop an example annual schedule for a cyclist who goals are to complete Century (100 mile long) rides. The most useful example came from “Spring Training: 10 Weeks to Summer Fitness” (hereafter referred to as Spring Training). In it is a plan for preparing for a Century. Ten years ago I wrote a post comparing four different plans for preparing for a Century. The plan in Spring Training was similar to every other Century training plan I have ever looked at with one exception: the actual Century ride is not part of the plan. What can that mean?
The topic of the eBook Spring Training is the Base period of training. Before the Base period comes the Pre-season period, described in the eBook “Productive Off-Season Training for Health and Recreational Riders” (hereafter referred to as Off-Season Training.) Spring Training says that in order to complete the Century training plan, a cyclist should have reached a total of 10 to 12 hours per week of training in the Pre-season period. I’m not going to go into detail on the Pre-season training plan here (I actually have a lot of thoughts about that but will save those for a future post) but briefly, a Pre-season training plan includes not only cycling but significant amounts of strength training and flexibility training as well so that 10 hours of total training includes about 6 hours per week of cycling, thus answering my first question, “What level of fitness does a cyclist need to reach before starting a training program for a Century?”
After the Base period comes the Build period. Intensity Training does not provide a link to a book about the Build period, so the best I could do is note that it is a minimum of four weeks long and that it features an increase in higher intensity training, and based on that, I guessed what it might look like and inserted that after the training plan from Spring Training. At last we come to the Main Season period. Is that where we finally get to do our Century ride? Intensity Training provides links to two books covering the Main Season, “Your Best Season Ever, Part 1: How to plan and get the most out of your training” and “Your Best Season Ever, Part 2: Peaking for Your Event.” Part 1 did not include anything I was able to use to construct my example. Part 2, which I will refer to as Peaking did, and what it did provide was surprising, at least to me. What it did is to delay the Century ride by six more weeks! This is eleven weeks between the longest training ride and the Century as compared to one to two weeks for every other plan I have ever seen. My first thought was that the fitness so painfully developed working up to that longest ride must surely be lost, at least in part, during that long delay. Although it is a dogma in the cycling community that endurance lasts longer than power, could it be that endurance would really last that long? As of the time of this writing, I simply don’t know, this will have to be a question for the future.
We have now reached the Century ride and the end of the example at the top of this Post. Sadly, we still have not reached the end of a year round cycling schedule. Allowing 3 months for the Pre-season period and a one month break at the end of the Main Season period, we have 3 months of the Main Season left. I confess I am guessing a bit here, but as best I can tell we should take off a week after the Century ride, and then do four more weeks of peaking and two more weeks of tapering before attempting a second Century. If we repeated this one more time, we might just have time for a third Century. However, according to the books I used to prepare this post, that’s probably pushing it, planning for two Century rides a year is probably about right for most riders.The leftover weeks can be used to work around the fact that Century rides are scheduled when they are scheduled not where they fit in best with our schedules. I’m not quite sure what kind of riding should be used to fill in the gaps, yet another question for the future.
I’d like to conclude with one final point: the figure at the top of the post is just one example of what Coach Hughes suggests. (Actually, it is my best guess as to what Hughes suggests. Any mistakes in it are mine, not his.) He would be the first to say that each cyclist should alter it to fit their unique interests, strengths, and weaknesses. Having read ten of Coach Hughes books, I am struck by how the same question is answered in so many different ways in different parts of Hughes’ body of work. This could be interpreted as inconsistency, but I prefer to interpret it as flexibility, that it is Coach Hughes’ way of saying “...or you could try it this way or that way or…” Even given that, I find the example I constructed very helpful, it is much easier for me to look at it and swap different ideas in and out of it than to try to convert general principles into concrete action plans on the fly.
