The scourge of the moderate cyclist

If you want to get faster on the bike, it’s not going to happen by riding around mile after mile at a moderate pace when training. It’s not going to happen by going out and trying to hammer on every training ride. It’s not going to happen if you double your millage or your weekly training time. Yes, saddle time is very important, tempo rides are important, but to move up to new levels of speed and power requires careful control of training intensity.

Go slow to go fast

To get faster, you have to train faster, but also slower too, let me explain. To ride and train really hard so that you break through new barriers, you need to prepare yourself for these breakthrough training rides by letting your body fully recover from the last hard breakthrough ride.  You actually get slower when you’ve trained hard, it’s on your recovery days or easy days that you heal and recover from your last hard training session and get just a tiny bit faster. It’s very easy to screw up the rhythm of your training and mess up this tiny improvement they call “super compensation”. If you’re not fully recovered and try to go out and do another hard session you won’t be able to do it at 110% effort, maybe 90% and it will take even longer now to recover let a alone reach a state of super compensation.

It’s much easier said then done though. It’s very tempting to “test” ourselves on every ride, to start hammering with reckless abandon, to get competitive on “easy” group ride days. To want to win so bad that you find it impossible to ride slow on easy days. But have faith, those easy days are probably more critical for getting fast then your fast days, if you can hold yourself back and let yourself recover fully and listen to your body, and only go all out when you’re 100% you’ll see much better results, be less tired, less likely to get injured, less frustrated, less likely to just quite cycling all together out of frustration when you’re not improving. Be patient, let the training process work, you have to believe in it.

Recovery day rides are not meant to test you or challenge you, they are meant to speed up recovery. It’s very easy to push to hard and re-stress your body when it shouldn’t be. Here are some tips I use to make sure my recovery days are just that

1. Don’t do group rides on your “easy” days as it’s too easy to get caught up in friendly competition of if the ride leader is  feeling good that day they might take you on some killer hill climbs etc. that you should not be doing on your easy day.
2. Use a heart rate monitor with it range alarm function to “yell” at you when you start to push to hard. Most monitors allow you set a maximum BPM you want it to go to, when you go higher the alarm goes off to tell you to ease up.
3. Ride on roads with little traffic that are scenic, there’s something about cars flying by you on the road that forces you to ride faster, sometimes there are legitimate safety reasons for not riding slow on certain roads or sections of roads.
4. You could also cross train on your easy days, go for hike, go for jog, swimming, even a fast walk will work
5. Just as bad as training hard before you’re fully recovered, not doing anything and sitting around on stiff sore legs can be just as bad and delay recovery.
6. If all else fails and you are a hammer and find it impossible to ride slow, then take off on your easiest days, but try to at least go for a walk etc. if you can.

Train faster to get faster

As obvious as it sounds, you’d be surprised at the number of cyclists that just keep doing moderate training rides, thinking slowly but surely they’ll get faster some how. They ride miles and miles and miles day after day, always pushing to go faster, but wondering why they’re not improving or improving very slowly. They only ride slow when they’re forced too because they’re exhausted from the volume of moderately hard rides and lack of recovery, or injury, some even get so discouraged they quit.

The “secret” to riding faster is that you’re going to have to make sure you’re fully recovered before a hard day, and then on that hard day, you want to give it 110%.  Hard break through sessions don’t need to be long, and probably shouldn’t be as you only need a taste of intensity to stimulate your body to get a little stronger, you don’t’ want to rip yourself to shreds by doing high intensity and high volume at the same time, you’ll only dig yourself a deep hole from which you need to recover from then. So hard training days should be shorter in general. You get faster not by volume but by increasing intensity, so be very careful with the volume of high intensity riding you do, it’s very easy to push yourself over the edge and actually get slower not faster.

The tricky part of getting this training rhythm right is knowing when your body is ready to train at 110% again.  Just because you have a hard day planned doesn’t mean you should be going hard that day. There are signs and signals your body will give you to let you know you need back off for another day or two or longer. Like

1. Increased resting heart rate at waking
2. A sudden drop or gain in weight, you may be dehydrated, or be holding water in your muscles because they’re swollen, or both.
3. Darker urine, you’re probably dehydrated
4. You may feel moody or cranky
5. Lack of motivation to train
6. You may feel weak or jittery
7. Have a headache
8. Difficult to get out of bed
9. Legs feel heavy
10. Difficulty sleeping
11. Lack of appetite
12. Inability to concentrate
13. If you train, your heart rate will be higher then normal
14. The amount of watts you can produce at a given heart rate is lower then normal, or heart rate is higher then normal
15. Lowered Libido
16. Inability to raise your heart rate to it’s max if you’re doing max efforts that normally would push your heart rate there.
17. Leg muscles that feel weak when riding
18. Leg muscles that fail and burn much faster then normal
19. Difficulty spinning at higher RPMs

And most importantly, sometimes you just don’t know that you need to rest more, you may have no symptoms or signs, this is why it’s critical to have planned in recovery weeks in your training cycles through the year, and also to have a transition period at the end of the season where you let your body recover from the entire season in general. I’ve started training in phases and at then end of each phase I have a full easy week, where I let myself recover, even if I feel a 100% and want to go hammer I make sure to take it easy this week, they’ll plenty of chances to hammer in the next 4-5 week training phase. They call this week an “unloading” week. you ramp up your efforts over 3-4 weeks then have an unloading week to make sure you’re fully recovered. You are ramping up and recovering during your weekly training cycle too, with unloading days, and ramp up days.  Being too enthusastic and not letting yourself recovery fully is probably the most common training mistake, and also not riding hard enough on your “hard” days.

Everyone’s  training rhythm is different, so you may be able to do two or three really hard days a week, where someone else can only handle one really hard day a week, and need to take it easy the rest of the weak. In general smaller fitter riders seem to recover faster, then larger more unfit riders, also genetics plays a role too.

Don’t let this season be mediocre for you, have it be a breakthrough season!