Weekend workouts

do you train the rest of the week ? it is important for us to know before giving you answers

The full week looks something like this:

Tue AM - 1.5 hrs, with two hard 5 mile repeats; I treat them like mini TT's
Wed - 1.5 hrs of SST, either AM or PM depending on what's going on in the office, or sometimes commute to work, 2.5 total hours easy
Thu PM - 2.5 hrs, the core of which is a 35 mile group ride that is essentially a short RR every week; very high intensity
Sat AM - weather and schedule permitting, roughly 4 - 5 hrs out in the county with a lot of climbing
Sun PM - hard intervals, usually 4 min to 12 min, occasionally 2x20's; total of 2 to 2 1/2 hours

Mon and Fri are make up days if it rains all weekend or work gets in the way of the mid-week workouts. Otherwise, upper body lift at the gym.

What I am really wondering is how much training benefit I give up by doing the Sunday short intervals when the legs are still feeling the miles from the previous day. One aspect of being just a few weeks from 50 is that it seems like I cannot do back to back hard days like I used to. I really enjoy the long Saturday morning rides, so maybe the solution is to wrap that ride around the short intervals, and then just Sunday as a mid tempo recovery day.

I was just curious if anyone else puts their weekend long ride first, and the higher intensity ride on Sunday.

Cheers!

Quoted post said:

...I was just curious if anyone else puts their weekend long ride first, and the higher intensity ride on Sunday.

Sure, I do that most of the winter with a team ride on Saturday that I often stretched to my longest ride of the week often riding four to six hours total including the first few hours of riding with the team followed by long Threshold intervals on Sunday. That was my standard pattern from December through March this past winter and it worked nicely.

Are you sure you're taking care of nutrition both during and especially immediately after your long Saturday ride? If I didn't eat or drink enough during my longer ride or especially if I didn't pay attention to critical half hour refueling then I would sometimes feel off on Sunday but even then I could usually manage a set of 2x20s or 2x30s at 90% of FTP or more.

But looking at your recent post I personally wouldn't schedule shorter intervals, including L5 work the day after a big ride. That might be a bit much as those shorter harder efforts take a lot of mental and physical energy to do well.

FWIW, one way to look at this is to ask yourself what represents the best use of each training day given your own training and life limitations instead of what the ideal schedule looks like on paper. It sounds like the long Saturday rides fit your schedule well and have worked well. So the question becomes what's the best use of Sunday. If L5 work is too much to ask on the final day of your training week then perhaps some long L4 intervals would be a better bet. If that's still too much based on what you've done all week and what you did on Saturday then perhaps some Tempo/SST. I tend to look at the week as a balance between what looks good on paper and what I can actually accomplish given my available training time, recovery at that point in the week, life stresses, etc.

IOW, you do what you can do and the only real question is whether you could get a bit more quality out of the overall week and target your particular goals better by backing off the mileage a bit on Saturday or perhaps targeting a different Sunday workout given the fatigue you're carrying.

-Dave

Make up days for rain? Legs hurt too much? Sounds like one for the hipster/singlespeed forum 😉