Is It Time I Retired

Sillyoldtwit said:

Hi guys this is my first official visit to these forums.
I was interested to read about the 56 year young guy who was having trouble on the hills.
I am 63 going on 64 and have always been active. I was my school cross-country champ - ran for the RAF and later for AFD (athletics club in Aldershot).
Too cut a long story short, I no longer run except occasionally in the gym.
I'm now really into cycling and recently treated myself to a Cannondale 700 - nothing spectacular I know, but it suffices.

I ride on Sundays with a 35 year old guy. We do around 60 kilometres with a couple of nasty hills, and like the 56 year old I get left (not too badly) on the hills. Yet he can't stay with me on the flat where I seem to be able to motor along for ever at 35-40 kph. Last summer cycled (on the old heavy bike) for 7 hours at 28kph average with temperatures in the later stages at 34C.

After all this waffle, what I really want is to improve my hill climbing.
In the winter months, I do 2 sessions (tues & thurs) on the bike in the gym -
after a 5 minute warm up, flat out with a middle range gear for 40 - 60 mins.
In the summer last year I made Tuesdays an interval training day doing 2 min
intervals with a high gear with a 40 second recovery (pulse recovered from 160 to 120)

My climbing has improved this winter, so am I doing the right thing or should I be doing something else?
BTW I read somwhere in these forums a few weeks ago that on hills it is a
good thing to do 8 second bursts on the climb. I've been doing this, by first
going up 1 peg and after the burst returning to the lower gear.

Or perhaps you think I should hang up my pedals and take up jam making!

Well, it sounds like your training consists of a hodgepodge of methodology. If you were to structure your workouts better ... or even some 😉 ... you would realize better gains and probably be able to keep up with that 35 year old whipersnapper. Plan the work then work the plan. In other words, no need to hang up the cleats just yet.

As a suggestions, if you're going to train just 2 days a week during the Winter it would serve you better to space them out a little more. Instead of Tues & Thurs do them on Tues & Fri, Mon & Fri or Mon & Thurs.

Sillyoldtwit said:

Hi guys this is my first official visit to these forums.
I was interested to read about the 56 year young guy who was having trouble on the hills.
I am 63 going on 64 and have always been active. I was my school cross-country champ - ran for the RAF and later for AFD (athletics club in Aldershot).
Too cut a long story short, I no longer run except occasionally in the gym.
I'm now really into cycling and recently treated myself to a Cannondale 700 - nothing spectacular I know, but it suffices.

I ride on Sundays with a 35 year old guy. We do around 60 kilometres with a couple of nasty hills, and like the 56 year old I get left (not too badly) on the hills. Yet he can't stay with me on the flat where I seem to be able to motor along for ever at 35-40 kph. Last summer cycled (on the old heavy bike) for 7 hours at 28kph average with temperatures in the later stages at 34C.

After all this waffle, what I really want is to improve my hill climbing.
In the winter months, I do 2 sessions (tues & thurs) on the bike in the gym -
after a 5 minute warm up, flat out with a middle range gear for 40 - 60 mins.
In the summer last year I made Tuesdays an interval training day doing 2 min
intervals with a high gear with a 40 second recovery (pulse recovered from 160 to 120)

My climbing has improved this winter, so am I doing the right thing or should I be doing something else?
BTW I read somwhere in these forums a few weeks ago that on hills it is a
good thing to do 8 second bursts on the climb. I've been doing this, by first
going up 1 peg and after the burst returning to the lower gear.

Or perhaps you think I should hang up my pedals and take up jam making!

Can you tell us about the type of hills you typically ride? Climbing is all about improving w/kg over a certain duration, but the training can differ depending on what type of hills we are talking about. 8 second bursts are going to have a limited affect on anything but sprint performance. I suggest you read these forums and continue to concentrate on general improvement, perhaps with longer intervals, and the improvement on hills will come.

Thanks for your replys. After my hard ride on Sundays I need to recover being an old codger, so I train on Tuesday. Another day's rest then back to the gym onThursday. That leaves me 2 days to fully recover for Sundays ride again. I thought I had that just about right.
Most of the posts in these forums are aimed at the young bucks (rightly so). I would love to hear from someone nearer (or above) my age to see what training they do.
Just one final question - is my thinking correct in that, in the winter simple endurance training is the best thing and to start interval work around the end of March.
To answer a question- the worst hill on the climb is only about a mile with a 30degree stretch in the middle. After a shot flat area, it climbs again not so severely for another mile. There are quite a few other much shorter hills,
one of them being a real pig.
Sorry I don't know all the technical jargon - gradients, vo2 etc. etc.

Sillyoldtwit said:

Thanks for your replys. After my hard ride on Sundays I need to recover being an old codger, so I train on Tuesday. Another day's rest then back to the gym onThursday. That leaves me 2 days to fully recover for Sundays ride again. I thought I had that just about right.
Most of the posts in these forums are aimed at the young bucks (rightly so). I would love to hear from someone nearer (or above) my age to see what training they do.
Just one final question - is my thinking correct in that, in the winter simple endurance training is the best thing and to start interval work around the end of March.

Well, I'm 58, so I'll respond a little. (RDO is your age, I think, perhaps he will chime in to this thread later.) In our Master's category in NJ, two of the most successful racers are right around your age (and I hate to admit that in a 55-64 category, the two best are bumping that upper age limit!). And most of us are, or were, cat3s in earlier lives, and can still hold our own in most "all age" cat3 races (minus the finishing sprint...) - so age doesn't have to be a major issue. Your training schedule seems light from the perspective of a racing cyclist. My typical schedule is Monday off, Tues-Thursday various interval (i.e. fairly hard) workouts, Fri either off or very easy recovery, Sat another semi-hard workout (say around 2 hours) and Sunday Group Ride around 3 hrs. The schedule works in 3 week blocks, i.e. 3 weeks of increasing intensity, then an easy week. This was the final (hardest) week of one block, around 11 hours of riding (for the CP users out there, about TSS 750), next week will be an easy week. Lastly, many of us train with varying types of intervals through the winter; at least one current coaching theory is that with limited training hours, you have to maintain some intensity. Base miles are nice, but if you've been riding year round for a while, the base is always there, since there is never a long stretch with no training. The difference is that "winter intervals" tend to be relatively long "LT intervals" (4 x 10 minutes, 2 x 20 minutes, etc.) geared to working on maintainable power; closer to racing season the intervals become shorter and more intense (say 5 x 3 minutes), typically called "VO2 intervals" which stress a different aerobic system. Well, enough comments from one old goat, let the others add their thoughts!

Palewin thanks a lot for taking the time out, to not only tell me I'm perhaps doing things incorrectly, but also offering advice on what I could be doing.
Someone told me a long time ago, that when you approach your mid 50s and after a hard training session, you need to take the next day off to recover. I took this advice and have trained by this criterion ever since.🙁
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that even in one's 60s there is no harm in training 5 or 6 days a week.(for 3 weeks at a stretch)

Just one question though. What constitutes an easy week?

I just spotted this thread. Maybe I can help. I'm 62, and I can tell you that there is nothing inherent in your age that will prevent you from attaining very good cycling fitness and keeping up with the younger riders (including the hills). It's all about training. It sounds as though you have good endurance, but lack power. Your intervals are too short. I follow Andy Coggan's training schema, which is nicely summarized here peakscoachinggroup.comPowerTrainingChapter.pdfOpen ↗. Don't let the title throw you off. All of Andy's training levels are defined in three ways: power, HR and RPE. Your focus should be on L4 and L5 intervals, and I'd recommend an L4/L5 mix of at least 70%/30%. In fact, you could make a lot of progress doing only L4 intervals. Note that these are a minimum of 10 minutes, but longer is better. You need little if any recovery (e.g., 5 mins is plenty). Ideally, you do a 1hr ride at your max power (or HR or RPE) to establish your FT and then key your training intensity on that. But, I personally follow a somewhat simpler model. I ride all of my intervals at 90% of my max power for that duration. That's a very, very important point to understand. Intervals do not mean that you complete the interval dead tired ready to fall off your bike. It means you complete your interval and you could keep going at that intensity for a while longer. It's like water dripping on a stone. You won't see any change from day to day. But, after a few weeks and especially after a few months, you'll see a huge difference. BTW, the purpose of a recovery day is to allow your body to respond to the stress of a hard day and overbuild capacity. Think of it this way. The hard day is the day you make a bank deposit and the recovery day is the day the bank pays you interest. Making the deposit without collecting the interest doesn't lead to wealth (fitness). Keep at it and before long you'll be dropping the younger riders and they'll be complaining that these older guys have too much time to train because they don't have all the responsibilities of younger guys. I'm very sympathetic -- as long as I don't have to wait too long for them at the top of the hill.

Sillyoldtwit said:

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that even in one's 60s there is no harm in training 5 or 6 days a week.(for 3 weeks at a stretch)

Just one question though. What constitutes an easy week?

First, as my schedule showed, no harm in training 5 days a week. I like having the two rest days. If I ride on one of the rest days it is very, very easy, simply because the weather is nice, and never more than one hour, and I always have at least one day completely off the bike.
As to the "easy week" - it is made easier by cutting back both on volume and intensity. I would say roughly 60-70% of the prior week's time (I train by time rather than miles, but the concept works either way), and very little intensity (i.e. at most simple 4 to 5 minute high cadence intervals in a low gear on one of the days, plus whatever intensity comes naturally on Sunday's group ride.)
So the pattern is like a series of steps: for 3 weeks each step is slightly higher than the previous one (i.e. a slight increase in either time/distance or intensity, remembering that raising both at once is quite stressful) and then the fourth step goes down for the easy week. Then the next group of steps starts about where the middle (i.e. 2nd week) of the previous block was, so that the entire series is increasing over time. Now we get into more technical training which is too much to try and fit in an email (which is why there are books like Friel's "Cyclist's Training Bible", Carmichael's "The Ultimate Ride", and various others.) But in a much-too-general overview, what does change over time as the steps keep increasing is either the type of intervals (as mentioned earlier, from longer, less intense, to shorter, more intense) and ultimately in the racing season, the whole thing kind of plateaus, since the racing supplies more than enough intensity (and it can't be an infinitely increasing time requirement - about 14 hours/week of cycling is probably the most I ever do, and not many weeks that long)!
My last long-winded comment, since you specifically asked about climbing. Climbing ability is largely a function of power/weight, whereas riding on the flats is purely power. So if you want to climb better, you either lose weight (easy for me to say at a bit under 63kg) and/or increase power. The best power-builders, as RDO pointed out, are intervals at least 10 minutes long, and for many cyclists the 2x20 minute version is their "bread & butter" power workout. You find the effort level (again by feel, HR, or if you're lucky, power meter) that you can maintain at a constant level for 20 minutes, recover for 10 minutes, repeat one more time, "warm down", and you're done for the day!

I would like to thank Palewin and Rapdaddyo for all the info and link with more info. I can't absorb it all yet, will have to sit down and slowly digest it.
But already I feel a new inspiration and I hope it wont be too long before it is me who is waiting at the top of the hills for my young cycling buddy.🙂 After all he is only climbing 2/3 kmph faster than me at present.
Thanks again guys - great help - great forum!