Training while bike commuting

Riding twice a day is fantastic! You are really going to see huge improvements with the schedule you have set. I'm not going to tell you what you should be doing on each ride, but I will say that riding twice a day will give you more opportunities to do your efforts when you really feel like it.

Quite often people that don't ride as often as you, are forced to do hard rides when they really are not up to it.

Say you don't feel like doing intervals on the way to work, for whatever reason. Just do them that night on the way home.

Also, when you are meeting a group at night, you get that nice warmup ride in the morning, so you're feeling unblocked and full of fire later in the day.

Now, go and get that upgrade!

Thanks! It sounds like you're saying I can treat one direction of my commute as a base/recovery ride, and the other direction becomes whatever the program I'm following calls for that day. Sounds reasonable; that way I get a strong base regardless.

The biggest problem with my routine is that I sometimes bonk in the evening. I eat lots, but occasionally I may bonk due to several hard days in a row, or from lapses in my diet.

DennistheMennis said:

Thanks! It sounds like you're saying I can treat one direction of my commute as a base/recovery ride, and the other direction becomes whatever the program I'm following calls for that day. Sounds reasonable; that way I get a strong base regardless.

The biggest problem with my routine is that I sometimes bonk in the evening. I eat lots, but occasionally I may bonk due to several hard days in a row, or from lapses in my diet.

Simple enough, find more calories. Through drink, food, whatever. Carbs mainly. I once did a 9 day race in Martinique where I gained 5 lbs. I refused to bonk, so I constantly ate from sun-up to sun-down and rode strongly throughout. Better to eat a bit too much than bonk, unless you are trying to lose weight.

My commute round trip is about 34 miles. I commute 2 or 3 times a week. I structure one 1 commutting day (usually on Thrusday) doing TT interval work in either 2x20 or 1x30. Depending how I feel by the end of the night, I will either skip my commute home and take the subway or just ride it home instead. I can't do more than 180 miles a week while working 37+ hours, plus racing on weekends. I tend to eat a lot during the day and often worry if I have consummed enough calories for me to ride back home.

DennistheMennis said:

Hello all:

My first post here, after some lurking, so if this has been addressed already, please let me know (a search turned up nothing specific enough).

I'm a 44-year old Cat 4 living in Northern California, and I ride to work partly because I enjoy it, partly for health, fitness etc. I race because I can, end I enjoy that too! I use a HRM to ensure I do recovery rides, instead of the zone 2/3 I'd otherwise stay in.

I usually ride to work three days/week (during the rainy winter weather) or four days/week (during the summer), 20 miles one way through suburbs, though with few stoplights. In the summer weeks I often add one morning where I ride an extra 30 mile/2000 feet section climbing the mountain roads around here, and sometimes one evening/week with a fast group ride, also in the hills. That makes a total of 120 to 200 miles/workweek.

On most weekends I either ride 50-100 miles (solo or group), or go racing.

So, a total of 120-300 miles/week, year-round. (No kids, understanding wife!!!)

My main question is whether I can modify general training advice to work within my two rides to work and back. I have several training books, and all of the programs I've seen assume I just ride once a day. I mostly want to build up my sprinting, as the rest of my fitness seems fine.

Do I just split their rides up in two halves? Or do I treat each one-way ride to work as a full day in their program so I make 2 of their rides in 1 day? Should I just ride recovery in one direction, and do their recommended ride for that day in the other? Hire a real coach?

TIA!

Interesting tread.

I have almost the same sitiuation. Mine is a 40 mile round tripper and im going to be doing it 2-3x a week. Right now the club rides are on Thursday night so i was thinking about Tuesday/Wednsday for commute days but doing all the hard work in the AM leg where its mostly headwind and uphill and coasting home at a recovery pace for the PM legs. My thinking is that i'll have more than 24 hrs to recover from the Wed AM workout before the Thursday night ride where i'll get hammered into pulp and that gives me friday for an easy hour of spin and then get hammered again on the clubs Saturday ride.

My plan for the AM rides is to concentrate on doing hard efforts on all the hills (mostly long false flats), maybe throw in some sprints to the top and coast the flats and downhills for recovery. At least untill i get to a point in my fitness where i can do long cruise intervals over all the terrains.

Once the Thursday club rides are over, i'd like to up my commute to 3x a week on T,W & T and do hard efforts on T and T and use W as a recovery ride day. And take M & F off the bike. I'll be keeping Sat as a club ride day and sunday as an LSD day. This fall schedule should give me 11-12.5 hrs a week of training time and still have a life and save me a few pennies on gas.