I have ridden a bicycle most of my adult life and now at the age of 65 I find that doing more than 80ks on a Sunday is to taxing and I have take a few days to properly recover. 70ks, no problem, 90ks and I notice walking up stairs then next few days. Now I have my regular training sorted with hard and easy mix of stuff. I know if I do what is equal to 150ks a week all is good in the world.
Now next July (2015) we, meaning me and some younger bods are going to Italy for three weeks and ride some pretty hills, sorry mountains ! My fitness is fine, I'm just going to have a problem with the ks.
So the question is how long do I need to build to 400ks a week. I know it is going to be about endurance and glycogen stores
It's going to be about endurance and fat stores. Sure you don't want to run out of glycogen mid ride but you need to get to the point where you can ride for 5 hours. Ride often, ride long, ride at a brisk pace.
Find some organized Brevets/Audax's that provide some food and use those for long rides. It's much easier to get 200+km done when you know there's a few stops en-route. Find other organized rides that feature hills and more than 100km.
80km's in the mountains of Italy are going to be much harder than 80kms riding around Sydney. You'll need to get your gearing right too - if you know your route and the climbs have been used in past Giro d'Italia's then use the profiles for the climbs or climbbybike.com. From watching the races out there, a lot of the hills spend more than a few kms over 10%. Even Bertie (Contador) frequented the 34x32 bottom on many hills to keep the cadence up.
It sounds like it's going to be a trip to remember for quite sometime - train for it so you can enjoy it more.
