Long rides develop and enhance a different part of your cycling makeup. Where specific interval training develops specific strengths e.g. climbing or sprinting, long medium pace rides develops your aerobic base.
Training is a pizza - By Scott Schnitzspahn (Insidetriathlon.com)
Two things most endurance athletes love are training and pizza. What most people do not realize is that putting together a training plan and making a pizza are very similar processes.
The most important component to building a good pizza, and a good athlete, is to establish a large and solid base to support all of the more scrumptious components of your masterpiece. The base of a pizza is the crust of course. Without a thick and large diameter crust, a pizza will not be able to hold all of the sauce, cheese, and toppings that are responsible for a truly great tasting creation. Also, should the pizza crust be too small, the amount of toppings that you will want to add might not fit and could simply fall off.
The base of your training program should be aerobic endurance training. Without a large base of endurance training, an athlete will not be able to effectively absorb and recover from higher intensity intervals, anaerobic training or competition. Should you begin adding specific intervals and racing efforts to your training before building a large enough base, you may find that you cannot recover effectively and that your performance, like a pizza without a good crust, is not as good as you expect.
Creating a large and tasty pizza crust is not easy though. Chicago-style pizza is famous around the world for the thick, buttery crust and is many people's favorite. However, even the best dough can result in a bad crust if the dough is cooked too fast or not enough. A burnt or undercooked crust can ruin even the best pizza. Are you seeing where this article is going? If you haven't gone to the phone to order your pizza yet, read on.
Creating a base of aerobic fitness is probably the most crucial step in an endurance athlete's training program. However, like a pizza, building your base too fast or "under-cooking" your aerobic conditioning without enough volume will result in poorer performance later in the season.
To be safe, the base building phase of your training should last between eight and 14 weeks. The less experience you have in endurance training, the longer your base building period should be. Also, the longer and more intense your racing season will be (more toppings), the bigger your aerobic base should be. Workouts that build your base consist of aerobic-paced, low-intensity miles or laps in the pool. Aerobic base building workouts should be at a heart rate approximately eight to 30 beats below your lactate threshold or between 60-80 percent of maximum heart rate. While this training is "easy," it provides the perfect opportunity to focus on your technique with specific drills, fine tune your biomechanics and positioning and experiment with new equipment and nutrition supplements like sports drinks, energy bars or gels. The duration of these workouts should be increased in small increments, usually no more than 10 percent per week. Additionally, you'll benefit from a "regeneration week" every four to six weeks in which training volume is cut back 20 to 50 percent in order to absorb the previous weeks of training and mentally prepare you for the upcoming workouts in the following weeks.
Continue to build your base until about eight weeks from your peak racing period. After your base period, with your aerobic system maximized, you can start to add in threshold intervals, early season training races and high-intensity interval training. These types of workouts and low-priority races serve as the toppings to your aerobic "crust". The more base you have built, the more high intensity training you will be able to perform and the better your racing season performances will be. In other words, the bigger and better your crust, the more toppings you can add and the better your pizza will be.
Scott Schnitzspahn is a CTS/TriathlonGold coach who enjoys base training almost as much as his hometown Chicago-style pizza
