Last post I blogged about an annual training schedule I derived from the writings of the coach I follow, Coach John Hughes. Never in my life, not during my first cycling career (1963-1978), nor during my second cycling career (2008-Present), have I ever followed an annual schedule. Either I have ridden however suited me at the moment or more recently, I have had a pretty regular weekly schedule and from that, used a short training plan, 5 to 10 weeks long, to prepare for an event. However, I have at long last started to think about an annual schedule and even prepared a plan for one that, in theory, I could use during my 2024 cycling season. I did that because almost all coaches suggest following an annual schedule and I thought I might be missing something by not doing so. However, I am not ready to start following such a schedule, at least without a lot more thought. Thus, I anticipate at least one more blog post on that topic. As for this post, it covers a more immediate question: what kind of weekly schedule should I be riding right now?
My starting model for such a schedule also comes from Coach Hughes, a schedule I blogged about back in 2022 and which is diagramed at the top of this post. This schedule is actually three related weekly schedules of varying difficulty. The idea is an athlete picks a level of difficulty and then rides that same schedule each week until there is a reason to change. Each of these weekly schedules was made up of rides which varied both in Volume (how many minutes the ride lasts) and in Intensity (how hard to “push”, e.g. how fast to ride). In that earlier post I added a fourth “level” of Intensity I called Mixed Intensity to communicate that many of my rides were not ridden at the uniform intensities that Hughes called for, but at a mixture of Intensities. I also added a description of what I was riding at the time, labeled “My 2022”. How does what I am doing now, labeled “My 2023”, compare to what I was doing in 2022 and why did I make the changes I made?
One big change I made, important for comparing 2022 to 2023, is that I replaced two Mixed Intensity rides of 2022 with Zone 2 rides and the third Mixed Intensity ride with a Zone 3 ride. I am going to talk about why I made those changes later in the post, but for now I just want to talk about the consequences of doing so.
Back in 2022 when I first wrote about this schedule of Hughes, my cycling was going pretty well. In contrast, 2023 has been a rough year for my cycling due to problems with my back, problems that have gotten better but which are not gone. As I was planning the “My 2023” schedule, one of my main concerns was to make sure it had an appropriate level of difficulty, to not make it so hard that it drove me into overtraining. With that in mind, it may seem surprising that my minutes per week of riding is significantly higher in 2023 than in 2022. This may be the result of a mistake in planning on my part; it is far from sure that I have found the right amount of riding for my current situation. However, in addition to that possibility, there is another explanation for that increase. Look at the Saturday ride. It was 160 minutes in 2022 and is 195 minutes in 2023. Those two rides cover the exact same 33 mile long route (Alpine-Cañada) so the reason for the difference in Volume (minutes) is that in 2023, I am riding the same route more slowly (in Zone 2 rather than at Mixed Intensity). Thus, when comparing minutes, it seems like I have increased the difficulty of my riding when common sense says that I have done the opposite, that I have decreased it. It is to deal with these kinds of anomalies that I started tracking my weekly Load in addition to my weekly Volume (minutes). Load takes into account how long the ride lasts in minutes but also takes into account Intensity, how fast or hard I rode during those minutes. My estimated Load for the 2022 schedule is about 720 and for 2023 about 520, the 2023 schedule is, by this measure, easier. There are many reasons (which I will not cover in this post) to be skeptical about these Load estimates and in any case I am not the person in 2023 that I was in 2022 so even if my 2023 Load is lower than 2022, that doesn’t necessarily mean I have found the right amount of cycling, an amount that will avoid overtraining, I have to listen to my body to determine that. But as I have posted before, my body cannot propose a training schedule, it can only tell me if the schedule I am riding is too hard. That raises the question of how I arrived at this schedule, and in particular, why I decided to substitute Zone 2 for Mixed Intensity.
I started riding Zone 2 rides because I finally figured out how to do so and because so many coaches promised I could build more endurance with less fatigue by restricting 80% of my riding to Zones 1 and 2. The way I was able to complete the rides available to me in my current, very hilly neighborhood is by acquiring a new heart rate monitor, my TranyaGo sports watch, and by thinking through why my rides always seemed to contain some Zone 3 riding. Once I understood that, I was able to modify how I approached these problematic parts of my rides to bring them down into Zone 2. This gave me the two Zone 2 rides on Coach Hughes schedule, including the weekly long ride. But how long should that long ride be? Without going into a lot of detail, I have concluded that I can be ready for a Metric Century (a 100 kilometer, 62 mile long ride) if my longest training ride is 45 miles long and if the next longest ride, ridden two weeks earlier, is 33 miles long. My Alpine-Cañada ride is 33 miles long. It is a ride that I have been able to complete fairly easily, so I thought if I could handle a weekly schedule with that as my long ride I could be ready for a Metric Century with only two week’s notice. For my second longest ride of the week I picked another Zone 2 ride that I have found I can do pretty easily, my 17 mile long Cañada ride. The Hughes schedule also includes two Zone 1 rides which I can easily do on my trainer. This left me only the Zone 3 ride to figure out. I plan to write a whole blog post about Coach Hughes’ unusual enthusiasm for training in Zone 3 and the various ways he suggests doing that but for now, I am completing this fifth ride by simply not holding back as I do for my Zone 2 rides. I believe this serves the purpose and my TranyaGo agrees.
So how is this working out? I can't say for sure. Although I started this schedule eight weeks ago, I have only managed to complete it three of those weeks and therein lies a story. One week contained a conflict which prevented me from completing the schedule, three weeks I had outside stresses that left me too tired to complete the schedule, and finally, and there were three weeks during which my son asked me to ride with him. (The numbers don't add up because I rode with my son on some of the same weeks I was also stressed.) The rides my son wanted to do were not even close to anything on my schedule but, to me, the opportunity to spend time with my son trumped the importance of riding my new schedule. What I can say is the weeks I rode my schedule seemed hard to the point where I wondered if they were too hard. My plan was to keep riding that schedule to see if it got easier as I got into shape or if it continued to get harder due to fatigue buildup but these interruptions kept me from doing that. The way I am thinking about that schedule now is that it is aspirational, it is what I attempt to do knowing that life will sometimes get in the way. Even when I do not complete the schedule, it gives me a framework for what rides to do on the days I am able to do them.
There is so much I didn’t have room for in this post: Coach Hughes’ views on Zone 3, why the way I calculate the Load of a ride might be suspect, and dealing with the effect of the disruptions of life on my cycling, just for example. I hope to address at least some of these in future posts, stay tuned.
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