How Important are Long Rides?

If I'm planning to race only time trials, the longest being 40km, how important are long 3+ hour rides. If the longest race is ~60 min. Are there benefits to longer rides, or could that time be better spent recovering for harder FTP building workouts??

I'm no expert on the matter, but in my opinion it is always good to mix up your training. Throwing in an occasional long ride will have 2 main benefits for you. It'll throw your body a curve ball, and hopefully keep you from plateauing out. And it'll also develop your mental endurance to keep going once your body starts running out of fuel, depending on the intensity of your long rides vs. your shorter ones. In my opinion, if you can push yourself after 50+ miles in the heat, 40km will be over before you know it.

Again, no expert. When I used to train for long road rides, I used to train on gravel with a mountain bike to make it as tough as possible. Used to do pretty good.

How big a curveball? I have found at times an EPIC ride takes me up a level. Bit like the claim that the last week of a Grand Tour changes you physically. But then some EPIC rides wreck me.

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Hamish Ferguson: Cycling Coach
http://hamishferguson.blogspot.com/

I don't know. I do a lot of weight lifting and calisthenics, and I know that every 2 weeks or so, I have to at the very least change up the order of my exercises, if not change up the exercises themselves, otherwise I'll plateau within a month. At the same time, changing things up too often doesn't give your body enough time to adapt to the new stimulus.

Your thoughts on the usefulness on weight training, callisthenics for endurance cycling?

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Hamish Ferguson: Cycling Coach
http://hamishferguson.blogspot.com/

For a professional or even semi-pro cyclist, I really don't know because when you hit that level of eliteness certain rules don't apply. Kinda like quantum physics...kinda.

If I were training for a ride, I would definitely keep up calisthenics at the very least. I think calisthenics offer more benefit than heavy weight training would, because it kind of combines endurance with resistance.

The way I analogize it is longer rides, or runs, is like developing the transport systems to your metabolic machinery in the body. And calisthenics/resistance training is like upgrading the machinery to be able to turn out more power and use those nutrients delivered to it more efficiently.

i'm no expert in any part of the field that you all only recognize as the jailed term cycling but for me it's as important as you want and need it to be.

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