Training for Speed Questions

Yojimbo_ said:

Hello All

I want to increase my speed for long rides, and I'm looking for some tips on the best way to do it.

Currently, I do a long ride on Sunday - at least 72 miles, and I will be doing back to back 110 mile rides in 10 days or so. I also commute to work two or three times a week (about 18 miles each way). My speed is 18 - 21 mph when I'm alone, and a little faster when I'm in a group.

I'm thinking interval training is necessary, but I don't really know much about it. Any tips or advice on how to get my speed up to 21 - 25 mph would be most welcome.

I can't give you any tips on training but you may want to narrow down your question. Are you wanting to increase your speed specifically for back to back 110 mile rides? Or is that just something you are going to be doing in 10 days? Are you more interested in increasing your 50 mile time? Or do you just want to increase your speed in general? What's your time frame? Yadda yadda. You get the idea.

The training for a 50 miler is going to be quite different than the training for back to back 110 milers.

Yojimbo_ said:

Any tips or advice on how to get my speed up to 21 - 25 mph would be most welcome.

I, too, need to know how to get my 110-mile speed up to 25 mph.

Good question. I can't wait to hear the tips. 😄

try 2x20 minute intervals at your 1hour time trial pace. or 2-3hrs at 10bpm below your 1hr TT pace.
you can also do some shorter 5x5 minute intervals at higher intensity.
it's simple.

Yojimbo_ said:

Hello All

I want to increase my speed for long rides, and I'm looking for some tips on the best way to do it.

Currently, I do a long ride on Sunday - at least 72 miles, and I will be doing back to back 110 mile rides in 10 days or so. I also commute to work two or three times a week (about 18 miles each way). My speed is 18 - 21 mph when I'm alone, and a little faster when I'm in a group.

I'm thinking interval training is necessary, but I don't really know much about it. Any tips or advice on how to get my speed up to 21 - 25 mph would be most welcome.

You'll get a lot of very technical answers to your question, but I'll give you a simple one. First off, 10 days isn't a lot of time to get much training effect from anything non-chemical and legal, so I wouldn't get my hopes up of increasing my average speed much in so little time. That being said, if you want to go faster for any duration (5 miles to 100 miles) than you can now, you need to stress your systems more than you are doing with your steady pace rides. But, the next day you need to go easy to allow your body to do its thing and over-compensate for being stressed. I'd suggest two "hard" days a week. Given that you do your "long" ride on Sundays, I'd suggest that you go hard on Tuesdays and Thursdays and go easy on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. There are a myriad of well-conceived interval formulas, but the basic formula is that after warming up you go hard enough and long enough to hurt, and then go easy for awhile to recover. Then you go hard again, recover again, and so on until you need to cool down and the ride's over. It sounds like your commute ride is about 1 hour. So, you could break your ride up into three parts: 20 minutes to warm up, 20 minutes of intervals and 20 minutes to cool down. Your interval segment could be divided up in a lot of ways, but I'd stay away from intervals shorter than about 2.5 minutes because real short intervals are mainly for developing explosive sprint speed (which it doesn't sound like is your priority). A rule of thumb is to go easy for about as long as you go hard. So, if you go hard for 5 minutes, follow it with 5 minutes of easy spinning. And, in your case you could go hard the entire 20 minute interval segment because you'll have 20 minutes to cool down at the end. Your commute ride topography will dictate what you do to a large extent. The easiest places to go hard are uphill or into the wind. It's pretty hard to stress the systems adequately downhill or downwind. As far as how hard to go when you go hard, I'd go as hard as I could for that duration. If you go for 5 minutes, go about as fast as you can go and sustain it for 5 minutes. Remember, you get to rest after the 5 minutes, so really push it. If the last minute is not total hell, you didn't go hard enough. You'll learn to hate these interval days (I do), but they'll make you faster.

RapDaddyo said:

...but the basic formula is that after warming up you go hard enough and long enough to hurt, and then go easy for awhile to recover. Then you go hard again, recover again, and so on until you need to cool down and the ride's over. ...

I hate to sound picky, because this is a really great answer but I would like to contribute one small thing. There are two quite discrete but interrelated 'aerobic constructs' which can be targeted by different interval protocols. One relates to the power you can generate for short-ish (1.5-5minutes) bursts with a decent recovery period and is commonly termed VO2max power. The other is what I would call 'local endurance' and defines the power you can sustain for longer efforts (>5 minutes) and also how quickly you are able to recover from shorter efforts. Both these systems are interrelated, but also can be targeted independently. The first is targeted by shorter work periods at close to maximal HRs, the second by long steady-state intervals at around 1h pace.

L.

biker-linz said:

I hate to sound picky, because this is a really great answer but I would like to contribute one small thing. There are two quite discrete but interrelated 'aerobic constructs' which can be targeted by different interval protocols. One relates to the power you can generate for short-ish (1.5-5minutes) bursts with a decent recovery period and is commonly termed VO2max power. The other is what I would call 'local endurance' and defines the power you can sustain for longer efforts (>5 minutes) and also how quickly you are able to recover from shorter efforts. Both these systems are interrelated, but also can be targeted independently. The first is targeted by shorter work periods at close to maximal HRs, the second by long steady-state intervals at around 1h pace.

L.

True that. And, since the interval segment of a 1 hr ride would permit about 7x1.5min intervals with equal recovery, the last few will hurt -- that's good.

BTW, there's one more benefit of interval training that's not discussed much but I believe is hugely important. That's the psychological aspect. I think it occurs in the last minute or so of a really hard interval. When you realize you can survive another minute when your legs and lungs are burning (and then recover and do it again), you gain confidence in your ability to hang in. This carries over particularly to hills and peleton surges, where often a minute or two will get you over the hump. I've always wondered what we could do if we rode under the influence of a magic drug that would cause our minds to not perceive muscle pain. I think that's the drug that will need to be banned. Heck, forget about the drugs that work on the muscles below the neck. Go after the drugs that work on the brain.

I'm the original poster.

There may be some misunderstanding here. I only mentioned the 110 mile ride to give respondants some idea of the type of cycling I do.

I have no delusions of getting my 110 mile speed up to 25 mph in the next 10 days. All I'm aiming for is to generally improve my speed over the summer, starting with my commute to work (the 18 mile each way ride I do two or three times a week). After that, I'll like to be able to go longer at higher speeds. I'm thinking I could make better training use of my commuting rides - thanks to the poster who suggested breaking the ride into 3 20 minutes segments.

Another poster suggested the entire 1 hour ride is done at a higher pace. Which is preferable.....trying to ride the whole distance at the highest pace I can go, or split it into sections and do some very hard riding for intervals?

Ultimately, I'd like to get a decent century time, but that will be a long way off, and my speed will never be anywhere near 25 mph. If I could average 21-22 mph for that, I'd be pretty happy.

Thanks for your responses.

Yojimbo_ said:

I'm the original poster.

There may be some misunderstanding here. I only mentioned the 110 mile ride to give respondants some idea of the type of cycling I do.

I have no delusions of getting my 110 mile speed up to 25 mph in the next 10 days. All I'm aiming for is to generally improve my speed over the summer, starting with my commute to work (the 18 mile each way ride I do two or three times a week). After that, I'll like to be able to go longer at higher speeds. I'm thinking I could make better training use of my commuting rides - thanks to the poster who suggested breaking the ride into 3 20 minutes segments.

Another poster suggested the entire 1 hour ride is done at a higher pace. Which is preferable.....trying to ride the whole distance at the highest pace I can go, or split it into sections and do some very hard riding for intervals?

Ultimately, I'd like to get a decent century time, but that will be a long way off, and my speed will never be anywhere near 25 mph. If I could average 21-22 mph for that, I'd be pretty happy.

Thanks for your responses.

From your original post, it sounds as though you are already getting in one long ride a week at a pretty good pace. So, I think you would get more out of doing intervals a couple of times a week. But, don't forget about the easy days following the hard days. That's when you are actually getting the benefit. The purpose of the hard intervals is to kick-start your body into action to over-compensate.

biker-linz said:

I hate to sound picky, because this is a really great answer but I would like to contribute one small thing. There are two quite discrete but interrelated 'aerobic constructs' which can be targeted by different interval protocols. One relates to the power you can generate for short-ish (1.5-5minutes) bursts with a decent recovery period and is commonly termed VO2max power. The other is what I would call 'local endurance' and defines the power you can sustain for longer efforts (>5 minutes) and also how quickly you are able to recover from shorter efforts. Both these systems are interrelated, but also can be targeted independently. The first is targeted by shorter work periods at close to maximal HRs, the second by long steady-state intervals at around 1h pace.

L.

So will 1.5-2ish minute intervals make a greater impact on 5 minute power than 20ish minute intervals? I'm looking to up my 4-6 minute power and am not too worried about 20+minute power, other than sustaining it for now.

howzabout doin' 22 5 mi. rides at 25 on different days, this is a cumulative 110 if that counts for anything.
then there is always motorpacing...

frenchyge said:

I, too, need to know how to get my 110-mile speed up to 25 mph.

Good question. I can't wait to hear the tips. 😄