13 Principles for endurance riding
Monday morning 5th October 2020. 0915hrs a few kilometres south of Black Springs. My first successful attempt riding from Bowral to Lithgow via Goulburn chasing my first 400km ride (that ended up being 376km). One of the hardest rides I’ve ever done. Strava link.
Over the past few days, based on different discussions (online), I decided to codify and publish my principles for endurance riding. I would be interested to see what others in the space have as their principles.
Your training is designed to prepare you for the event. The closer your training mimics the event, the more valuable it will be. Most endurance races are point to point races away from major centres where you ride the entire race by yourself. Riding locally with the safety and comfort of easy outs is not replicating the race conditions, especially with others.
If your event of choice is road-based (to lesser extent gravel), Audax 1200s are excellent training, and I would be putting every 1200 into my calendar. Once you can do these, you could add an extra 200km to the final day (usually the shortest) and aim for 1,400km in four days. I reckon you'd want to aim for no more than 80% of your planned race pace. 350km per day (1,400km in four days) would equate to riding 420km in race conditions. Adjust as required.
If you broadly repeat the same type of ride (distance, duration, location, start time), you're going to get little benefit from repeating this week in week out. You'd gain a lot more by doing a 12 hour, 8 hour then 4 hour ride than three 8 hour rides on weekends. The same is true for doubles. Do your long ride, come home, eat, head out for half again, and take the following day off. That's a hard day. Extra points for doing this after a Grand Fondo. I did this after the Bowral Classic.
You need to find when you least like riding and choose to go out then. Maybe you really like early starts. Great, get up early and work around the house for six hours, then head out. You like starting late, get up at 0200hrs. You have a headache, stomach ache, emotional difficulty. Perfect. Head out. Chris Burkard summarised this idea in this podcast.
Design rides you regularly fail (see the previous point for ideas). If you consistently complete the rides you set out to do, you're playing this safe. I aim for a 50/50 chance on big rides, and I succeed too often, which means I am not making them hard enough.
"You will never do better than what you set out to do" - Mark Beaumont. Knowing this, choose to make them harder on your longer rides towards the end. Add some distance or complexity (terrain) etc. Go over a hill you don't need to. This teaches you that you can do more than the plan, which you can, of course.
Whatever discipline you usually ride, ride the following discipline 'across' (adjacent). For most people, this is gravel (for both road and mountain bike). If you're an endurance cyclocross rider, I guess you take up equestrian. Different bikes build skills you don't have, and they transfer across. You'll also use different bars, drivetrains, etc. and learn more about riding.
Your 'local' 200km, 300km, 400km or 500km ride is much easier than the same distance away from major towns. There's no comparison. If you want your Cub Scouts badge, arrive at Goulburn with 200km in your legs, then head into the night to ride to Oberon, preferably in winter. Bonus points for taking Mount Werong Road on a road bike or going through Vulcan State Forest. Extra points if this is your first overnighter.
At least once, ideally twice a year, take off a minimum of two weeks (I recommend four weeks) from riding altogether. Spend that time doing things you usually avoid; ocean swimming, kayaking, fastpacking etc. Doing this reminds you of what a learning mindset is. Watch how you get frustrated that it's not coming quickly. Take this back to your riding and ask yourself - when was the last time I felt this way with riding? Why have you settled so quickly?
Does your bike look the same as it did two years ago? Have you not thought about how you ride, what you need and how to do this better at any point? Really? Look into the Wolf Tooth B-RAD system.
Don't make your reward for riding alcohol, processed carbohydrates or something that has no nutritional value. Instead, learn to like protein shakes, or better still, eat real food after a long ride. Chicken, cheese and nuts are not a bad option with an apple. You're an adult, not a kid. If you're a kid into endurance riding, do what you like with food.
On nutrition - almost anything you've heard on a bunch ride is probably wrong. Ignore all of that and do the opposite (maybe not the exact opposite). Assuming you have some form of nutrition strategy, then spend time doing the opposite. For example, if you've trained yourself to eat gels and bars for 20 hours, switch to only real food - peanut butter, of course! The inverse is true - you should be able to do an all-day and all-night ride just on gels and bars. You're doing this to learn how to be flexible and adaptable when things go wrong, when places are closed, or your nutrition gets lost.
You can do more with what you have than you can imagine. Your gear is not holding you back; it's your perception. You might think you need a light bike, fancy equipment and an unhealthy obsession with aero. Look at what people rode 100 years ago and the rides they completed. Beyond what we can imagine.
These principles broadly work from the starting point that you should work out the best possible plan and execute this to your ability. Now assume everything goes wrong. Train for this possibility, and you'll always be ready. I heard an approach from Jason Koop where you imagine the worst possible outcome during the event (as a coach, he makes it worse than you think it could be) and then work out a plan for when that happens.
The above 13 principles are mine, you need to work out your own, but you could start here. I'm someone who doesn't consider them a cyclist. If I saw myself as a cyclist, I would up the level of difficulty on the above.
Here are the principles related to other aspects:
Be less fat. You want your waist to be less than 90cm (males). Unless you're pretty big and bulky (due to muscles), you'd want to be closer to 80cm. Leave your love handles at home. You're going to achieve this through changing your diet, not exercising. Eat differently and probably less.
Most cyclists who are good are also good runners. Do you run? If not, why not? It's more 'natural' than sitting on a bike. Recommended read 'Born to Run'. Tell me when 'Born to Ride' comes out.
If you don't want to run, you could do fast hiking. Riding 900 hours and doing 100 hours of fast hiking will benefit you more than riding 1,000 hours in a year and 0 hours of fast hiking. The temptation is to do this as two hours per week. This is not going to do much. Instead, use this 100+ hours as periodised into longer hikes. Your one-hour recovery walk makes you feel good rather than deriving any training benefit. You're also probably doing this too slow. What's a fast walk? A sub four hour marathon time walking. That's a fast walk. Your one-hour fast walk would cover 10km. The fast hikes could start at three hours and build up to six, eight, ten or more hours. For those in Sydney Bondi to Manly in a day (80km) would be a good achievement.
If your cycling coach gave you a strength program, you should probably throw this out and use a basic push/pull/legs program. This would probably be three days a week. Four is ideal but requires back-to-back sessions. Suck it up and make it work.
Your strength program is best done with a professional trainer who can see what you're doing wrong (trust me, you probably are), and they can help you correct this. I would choose someone that (i) wants you to lift heavy weights and (ii) owns a set of Olympic rings. Do face pulls. Lots of face pulls. Then do some more face pulls.
There are lots of measures of strength fitness, two straightforward ones to assess yourself against - can you do 5 x 20 (proper) push-ups and 5 x 5 (proper) pull-ups with a 1-2 minute break between each set? Starting from a low base will take 12-24 months if you work hard. Can't do one set? Better start training.
Part of the responsibility is to bring others along and recognise those who helped you. You can be the most individual rider, but you've always had a team behind you, even if it's just the people on YouTube whose videos you watch. Whatever you're doing to bring others along is not enough. Period. All endurance athletics is inherently selfish. My last girlfriend's first kayak trip was 38km from Glebe to Shelly Beach and back out through the heads in a double. She'll never forget that trip (for both good and bad reasons).
Don't be the person who states you do hard rides or believe you're any good. You turned pedals on an incredibly efficient machine. Let's keep your ride in context. I doubt it was that hard - you finished. If you want to see people who do extraordinary feats look at people who row across the Atlantic, kayak across the Tasman, summit all 8,000m peaks in seven months, ride around the world in 78 days in a year etc. I could find 1,000s of people who have done more amazing things than you, and they describe it with the humility you're lacking.
Stay humble, stay hungry.
Be bold, be patient, be consistent.