SATURDAY SPIN

I came home from a morning ride last November and typed a question into Google.

On that ride I had been listening back to the first half of our conversation with Professor Stephen Seiler. He has conducted some of the pioneering research on how elite athletes actually train. The most Googled cycling training question was how to cycle fast at a low heart rate.

Later that day I sat down with Stephen and recorded the podcast. There is no cheat for cycling fast at a low heart rate. He would love to offer a cheat. He has not found one.

Most riders are not waiting on a cheat. They have eight hours a week to train, and eight hours is all the training time they have. What they actually do with those eight hours is train every day for an hour or an hour and a half at a pace where they are working, but they can still talk. Stephen calls that 'pretty hard'. You are not recovering, and you are not going so hard that talking has to stop. They think riding like that every day is the best use of a short week. When every day is 'pretty hard', the heart rate at the same speed does not come down. Stephen does not think 'pretty hard' every day is the right use of eight hours.

The days that were supposed to be easy get ridden 'pretty hard', so they stop being easy. Easy means you could chat without thinking about the effort, and you would be ready to ride again the next morning. Then the days that were supposed to be actually hard arrive while you are still tired, so those days are not actually hard either. Actually hard means talking has to stop, or you are trying to rip the cranks off. The whole week sits in the middle. It is not easy enough that you recover, and it is not hard enough to be a hard day.

From that middle week, people feel they do not have time to go long. So they do seventy-five minutes where they are really pushing, or ninety minutes 'pretty hard', and they stop there. They never get a ride that lasts into a third hour.

I asked Stephen how he would spend those eight hours. Instead of spreading those eight hours across every day, Stephen puts them on four days, not five or six. One of the four is a three-hour ride, because a lot happens in the third hour. In the riders I coach, the first ninety minutes are the ride you already know how to do. The third hour is the part where your legs are already used and you are still not home. The person who stopped at ninety minutes 'pretty hard' is already in the kitchen. You are still out. That extra hour is the work a seventy-five minute push never gets you, and you only get it by still being on the bike.

Another of the four is a two-hour ride. The other two days are about an hour each, and those two hours are high intensity. High intensity here means those hours are actually hard, the kind where talking has to stop. Riders can handle those high-intensity hours because they have rest days in between.

Those rest days are not a loss. One rider coaches a girls' soccer team and also has a job. On the day she does not ride she can pay the bills and stand on the sideline with her daughter. One three-hour Saturday ride also costs less of her life than two rides of ninety minutes, because she only gets changed and cleans the bike once.

People think that every day they should ride pretty hard, feel pretty tired when they finish, and take that tiredness as proof they did the right work. That just is not so.

And if you are interested in the full conversation with Professor Stephen Seiler, here is the episode.

P.S. If you want help putting this week on the calendar, you can apply for Not Done Yet coaching.

Anthony

If this was useful, send it to one rider still stuck on pretty hard every day.