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| The Start of the 2019 Golden Hills Century |
[This is Part Two of a two part series. You probably want to read Part One before reading this part.]
What is a Century?
A Century is a bike ride that is 100 miles long. It is a very popular milestone for recreational cyclists. I think its popularity comes from the fact that it checks so many boxes. It sounds impressive - 100 miles! It is real challenge for most cyclists; when you finish your first century you probably will feel very proud and very tired. On the other hand, a century is not too hard, many cyclists have been able to complete one. Also, it is a "thing" in the cycling community, so there are plenty of organized century rides to make your first one as fun as possible. Does that mean that you can ride a century? Probably, but not necessarily, and it is no big deal if you can't. In fact, there is absolutely no reason to ride a century unless you want to. You can get almost all the health benefits of cycling by riding much shorter distances. To put this into perspective, at age 70, I do not ride centuries. I prefer the metric century, which is 100 kilometers long, or 62 miles. Five years ago, I was riding distances twice that, 200 kilometers or 124 miles, but could only manage one of those a year, and rode them in Texas where the rides are relatively flat. By riding the metric century, I can ride several a year on the hilly roads of my new home state of California.
For most cyclists, riding a century is done as part of an organized group ride. Most such group rides will offer routes of varying lengths. By far the most common length is the century, and that often features in the name of the ride, The Golden Hills Century, for example. That name notwithstanding, when I rode the Golden Hills Century in 2019, I had a choice of rides that were 101, 65, 32, and 23 miles long. The metric century is probably the most common alternative offered to cyclists like me for whom 100 miles is just too much. If I was just riding for my health, the 23 mile ride would have been plenty (along with other riding I do.) I chose 65 miles because it sounded like the most fun.
Training
Personalized Training
In this section, I am going to suggest a personalized approach to training that starts with listening to your body, and based on what your body tells you, selecting your goals and developing a personalized training plan to reach those goals.
Everybody Cheats
My current favorite training book is Distance Cycling by John Hughes and Dan Kehlenbach. I have been looking back at that book as part of writing this post, and I noticed that Chapter 3 was targeted directly at me back in 2008 when I restarted cycling after 30 years off the bike. In the best tradition of the medical establishment, the program offered in this chapter includes aerobic training (e.g. cycling), strength training (e.g. lifting weights) and flexibility training (e.g. stretching). What would my health and cycling ability look like now had I followed the advice in that chapter rather than just doing the random cycling that I did? The question is moot because there was no chance I was going to do that. In the five years prior to restarting cycling, I had tried a variety of different exercise programs, none of which I stuck with. Just cycling, though not a perfect exercise program, was something I have stuck with and doing that is much better than the actual alternative, which was to do nothing at all. What I did was cheat by doing too little (e.g. skipping the weights and stretching.) Another way of cheating is to do too much. Hughes and Kehlenbach argued that it would have taken me 5 or 6 months back in 2008 to get ready for my first century ride. Based on my experience, it would have taken me longer, and the reason for that is that I was 59 years old back then and their book is meant for younger riders. Having said that, lots of cyclists will attempt their first century with a lot less preparation than the experts recommend, and some of them will succeed. The experts are right to recommend what they do. They are writing for a broad audience and have to suggest programs that cover a large percentage of their readers, are consistent with the recommendations of the medical establishment, and which are safe. By learning to listen to your body, you will be able to determine where you can get away with cheating and where even the conservative advice of the experts is too much for you, and how to revise their advice to fit your particular strengths and weaknesses.
Resources
Whether you decide to ride a century, a metric century, or some other distance, you can find lots of books that will help you prepare for that challenge. The purpose of this post is not to replace those excellent books, but to supplement them with my experience, emphasizing points that I found to be underemphasized, or adding extra information that might not be in all the books.
Because the century is such a popular distance, the majority of training plans are for that distance, but you can find plans for other distances as well. In addition, I suggest you customize any training plan to your personal situation and abilities anyway, and customizing them for a distance different than what they are designed for can easily be part of that. One more argument for customization: it is currently fashionable to present training plans with ride lengths given in minutes instead of miles. The idea is that a hilly ride or a windy ride will be much harder than a flat, windless ride and thus if you train based on miles, you might end up training too hard. The problem comes in because 1) different people ride at different speeds and 2) the challenge ride (e.g. century) that you are training for is measured in miles, not minutes. If you are a slow rider, your longest training ride might be too short to prepare you for your challenge. Thus, you need to customize the length of the training rides to match your speed.
I have found it useful to look at more than one book. What is missing in one may be present in another, and seeing things from multiple perspectives I find useful. As I have already mentioned, my current favorite book is Distance Cycling, but over the years, I have read close to a dozen training books, and I don't regret purchasing any of them. An issue I ran into is that most of the books are written for riders much younger than me. Yes, there are books with titles like "Cycling Past 50" but when I read them, it seemed like they were intended for people who cycled continuously all their lives, to help them continue their cycling rather than for someone like me who somehow stopped exercising for decades (or who never exercised at all) and are attempting to get into shape, not stay in shape. Do I really expect someone to write a book just for me? No, but given how much person to person variability there is, the approach I wish at least some of the training books would take would be a more generalized one, to alert people to the possibility that their experience might be different than that of other cyclists for any number of reasons, and to teach them how to customize their cycling to the person they are. Whether you are different than the cyclist for whom a book is written because of your genes or age or history, such an approach would, in my opinion, be helpful.
Listen to Your Body
There is the famous statistic that 65% of cyclists train too hard, 25% don't train hard enough, and only 10% get it right. I feel like most of the books I have read are focused on the 25% who aren't doing enough rather than the 65% who are doing too much. Yes, all of the books (including Distance Cycling) include advice about listening to your body to avoiding overtraining, but it is usually somewhere in the middle of the book as a parenthetical warning. I would move that advice front and center and give it much more emphasis. I think the first thing every aspiring cyclist should learn (after they learn how to ride a bike) is how to listen to their body.
Your body will tell you what your limits are, but only if you listen. There are two ways your body gives you feedback: how you feel and how fast you ride. If your legs feel tired when you start a ride, that may be a sign you are riding too much. (Your legs may well feel tired at the end of a ride. Within reason, that's a good thing.) You may wake up in the morning and not feel like doing your ride that day. Start the ride, but if that feeling does not go away, quit early and take it as a sign you are riding too much. As you go about your day, you may find that you are grumpier and more tired than usual and/or that you lack the energy to complete your daily tasks. This is a relative feeling: everybody feels that way to some degree and some of the time. If these feelings suddenly get worse, especially after you have increased your riding, this may also be a sign you are riding too much. All of these are different aspects of how you feel. Your body may also telling you that you are exercising too much when instead of getting faster or staying the same, you start getting slower. (In my experience, getting faster is rare. I am happy when, on average, my speed stays the same.) Your riding speed varies from day to day for a wide variety of reasons, so this is not something you can tell from a single ride, but if several rides in a row are slow, that is a message from your body. I have had no luck comparing my speed on one route to to my speed on another, there are simply too many variables whose impact on speed hides the message from my body. To get around that, some books recommend periodically riding a test ride over the same route under the same conditions to track your progress. Because I have go-to rides that I ride over and over anyway, I just watch my speed on those rides. I use my cell phone and Strava to do that, but even simpler is looking at a clock when you start and when you finish to determine how long the ride took. You might decide to purchase a dedicated cycle computer, they are great, I used one for several years. However you do it, if you notice that the same ride ridden at the same effort level is routinely slower than usual, this may be a sign you are riding too much and/or too hard.
Once you have learned to listen to your body, you are set to try some experiments. How much training can your body tolerate? How long do you need to recover between rides? (This will be different for different kinds of rides. Interval training, brief periods of riding very fast, takes me much longer to recover from than other rides.) Any training books you decide to look at will be an excellent source of ideas to test. Be aware, however, that it may take weeks for a training plan to reveal that it is too hard. The first week or two will feel great, but as the plan goes on, your body will start telling you that it is too much and that it is time to change your plan to something easier. An important point I missed is that it may not be enough to go back to your previous training plan. By the time your body talks to you, you have built up a fatigue debt that needs to be paid off, and the only way to do that is a week or two (or maybe more) of easier riding. During the payback period, your body will continue sending you tired signals. Once those stop, you can move back up to a more sustainable training plan.
There is a strong movement within the medical establishment that looks with concern at the studies which suggest that more exercise is always better. Their concern is not so much overtraining, but that ambitious training plans might discourage some people from starting an exercise plan at all when it is well known that any amount of exercise is much better than none. Best is the enemy of Good. With that in mind, yes, it is better to distribute your exercise over the week than to do it all on the weekend, but if your life does not allow you to exercise during the week, just riding on the weekend is better than not riding at all. However, if you do have the flexibility to exercise during the week, then one of the first experiments you might try is how many days a week can you ride without hearing from your body. Cycling coaches argue that you should ride at least four days a week (though see the start of this paragraph) and as best I can tell, almost nobody benefits from cycling more than six days a week. Where is your sweet spot? For me, it is four days a week, the extra recovery between rides this gives me seems to help my training. How fast, how hilly, and how long should each of these rides be? Where do you even start? This is where all those training books can be helpful. The example book I am using here, Distance Training, has a starter program for someone who is not currently exercising regularly. Try that. If it seems too easy and your body hasn't complained, try more rides, longer rides, faster rides, or hillier rides. If your body complains, try the reverse.
After a few months of experimenting and listening to your body, you might have a sense of what kind of challenge would be best for you. Look around at the local rides and pick one that looks like fun and has a distance that matches that. Maybe none of the books has training plan for a ride that short. For example, the shortest training plan in Distance Cycling is for a 100 mile challenge ride. If the challenge that makes sense to you is a 50 mile ride, just cut all the rides in that plan in half. These plans tend to be between 8 and 16 weeks long. If you feel like your challenge might be on the difficult side, and if your body has been telling you that you need plenty of recovery, try the 16 week plan. If you have been riding for a long time and you feel confident you can meet the challenge, try the 8 week plan. Some of these plans offer a range for each ride length, for example, 1 hour 30 minutes to 2 hours 30 minutes, you would decide between these similarly. As you try the plan, keep listening to your body. If you find the plan is too much, you might be able to cut back a bit and still reach your goal, but it is very possible you will realize your goal was too ambitious - that's fine! The whole point of an experiment is to learn. At that point, rethink your goal. Maybe you tried for a century and couldn't do it. Next time, try for a metric century. After that, a century might be within your reach, or it might not. If not, you can join me on the metric century circuit.
After Your First Century
How soon after your first century (metric century, half century, ...) can you ride another one? It is essential that you rest adequately between challenges. The length of the break you need to take between challenge rides can be as long as a year. That was perhaps the biggest mistake I made when I first started riding 200 kilometer rides back in 2012. I thought once I was in shape for one of these rides, I could now ride one any time I liked, and in fact, might be ready to try a 300, then a 400, and eventually a 1200 kilometer ride (yes, they exist.) The interesting thing is, some people can do that. I couldn't, and maybe you can't either. The consequences of not resting adequately after a challenge can be severe and long lasting, so it is much better to err on the side of caution.
A Yearly Cycle
The medical community says that, ideally, we should get 300 minutes a week of aerobic exercise. At the end of Distance Cycling's eight week preliminary program for those not currently exercising, that is about what you are doing. If all you were doing was to try to meet the medical recommendations, you could continue that last week indefinitely. To avoid boredom, you can sometimes get your 300 minutes of aerobic exercise by cross training. Instead of cycling, you might hike, jog, or play tennis for example. One could imagine a yearly cycle that involved just getting in your 300 minutes most of the year, but eight or sixteen weeks before your favorite Century, you go through a training program to get ready for the event, and then go back to 300 minutes a week until next year. I have been riding for over 10 years since I restarted cycling, and I enjoy doing more challenge rides than that. My challenge rides are also shorter, 62 miles instead of 100, so it doesn't take me 8 weeks to get ready for one. In fact, I have been intrigued by a "challenge of challenges", to ride a metric century every month*. Can I do that? I don't know yet, I am in the middle of that experiment as I write this. Does that mean twelve metric centuries a year? It might, but probably not. It seems like most people's bodies do better when they take a break and change things up each year, to have a "cycling season." The person who inspired me to attempt a metric century a month rides metric centuries April through October, and does other activities the rest of the year. Listen to your body, listen to the advice of the medical community, and with those very broad constraints, do what makes you happy.
Summary
Although I restarted cycling in 2008, it was only in 2012 that I completed my first challenge ride, 200 kilometers with the Houston Randonneurs. When I initially tried to prepare for this ride using the same haphazard approach I had been using up until then, I failed. My wife purchased "The Complete Book of Long-Distance Cycling" for me, and following the plan in that book, I successfully completed that ride. However, that book left me hanging as to what to do thereafter, not so much by what was missing from the book as much as from the relative emphasis it gave to different topics. Perhaps it is just me, perhaps I am a sloppy reader and that other readers of the book would have picked up on what I missed. Or perhaps not. Perhaps if I made that mistake, others might also. The other problem I ran into is that the book was not really written for me. I was 62 years old when I read the book, and it is clearly focused on younger riders. That is, I was different from other cyclists. It turns out, however, that everyone is different from other cyclists, we are all individuals with our own strengths and weaknesses. The reason for our differences (e.g. age) are less important than that everyone is different. Over the years, I have continued to read and experiment and pay attention and I feel I am much better at developing a cycling plan that fits me than I was eight years ago. I listen carefully to my body. I am much more concerned about cycling too much than I am about cycling too little. I have fun. The purpose of this post was to share these simple ideas in the hopes that someone besides me will find them useful.
* When I was in High School (way back in the 60s) I would ride a century a week, 100 miles in the Sierra Nevada mountains was my bike club's standard weekend ride.
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