Hi Calvin, My general advice for the "lazy randonneur" would be a couple of short rides during the week and a long ride during the weekend. When my children were young, this meant trainer sessions during the week and longer rides on the weekend.
The general rule of thumb is the shorter the ride, the harder the effort should be. Go all out on hills and mix in sprints on the trainer. It's either longer time with less effort or shorter time with more effort (there's a lot of research on interval training). My long rides during the weekend would try to get a little longer for the longer brevets, but this is not necessary as the shorter/harder formula works well here too. I tried to focus on what needs improvement. One big tip is that the vast majority of these rides are flats interspersed with some hills. This means a 1 mph improvement on the flats can lead to huge differences in time. On the flip side, the hills are where we can overdo it and ruin our legs for both hills and flats. So my basic motto is to survive the hills and power on the flats. With this idea in mind, I try to spin higher gears on the flats for my training rides so my body gets used to a faster pace. For hills, I try to find as many as possible, but I favor shorter hills and rollers over long mountain climbs because there is more opportunity for high intensity (e.g. power over the rollers) followed by recovery on the shorter efforts and this profile fits the brevets I'm training for. My ultimate goal for the weekend ride is to space out my efforts so that I'm wiped out by the time I get home. Ideally, we would get wiped out on the shorter rides during the week, which I can do on my commute by climbing some steep hills on my way home, but it takes a lot of mental fortitude to do that on a trainer with all out intervals. The second big tip is that all that hard training we do for the ride has to be flipped on its head for the brevet. For emphasis: don't ride too hard at the start of the brevet! We put in 100% effort for the 50 mile ride and get home wasted, but we can't go that pace on the 250 mile ride--otherwise we'll be wasted after 50 miles and suffer for 200 miles. --I know from experience, because I've gone too hard at the start and then have suffered for hundreds!! of miles. Because we are used to going hard for short distances, we think that we can go hard at the beginning and be ok later on. This thinking is a recipe for disaster. Instead, what we need to do is find that "go forever" pace. Be okay with everyone else taking off and find that "forever" zone and stick with it. The time limit is not generally a speed challenge. An easy rule of thumb is that riding 10 mph (with no stopping) allows me to finish within the time limit. Every 2 hours of riding 15 mph on the flats gains 1 hour of rest time. Even if I crawl up a hill at 5 mph for 30 min, I can make up for this on the flats in 30 minutes@15 mph and then start banking time for my rest. I try to minimize time off the bike by keeping my stops short. Food/water/bathroom for 15 minutes or less, and I can be on the road again--eating/taking in calories while riding helps keep stops short. I hope you get to ride some longer brevets and have fun doing it! Toshi On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 5:54 PM Cal Patterson <[email protected]> wrote: > Strong work! I have a question Toshi, and anyone else too I suppose, > Do you have a method or rule or goal for how much to ride, (and how hard, > and how far) between the different brevets while you're doing a series? > Assuming the 2, 3, 4, and 600 are usually each two or three weeks apart, > what do you aim to do in between them, to get adequate rest but stay "with > it"? > > Thanks > Calvin > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/CAGB59xw-3Q2vJFMBuytd7%3DqsJc8U_fRGcYf-1hZKUCfKAnH9yg%40mail.gmail.com.
