It’s the time of year for laying grand training plans, promising yourself that you’re going to be committed, deliver 100% compliance to your schedule, and finally fulfil your potential.
Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week
While we’re all still clinging to this fantasy, I thought it might be helpful to review the various training sessions you might have in mind. Not for their effectiveness, which for the most part will remain a mystery even after you’ve done them for years, but for their practical pleasures.
We shall start with the Long Ride. This is the staple act of being a bike rider – heading out and getting the miles in. “Long” can mean absolutely anything you like, but if it’s less than around 45 minutes, you’ll want to lie about it to other riders. The long ride has the pleasures of fresh air, the view, perhaps some companionship. The downsides are that they take ages, and the whole “doing it with a few mates and stopping for coffee and a cake” can give the impression to the rest of your family that you might just be having fun with your friends.
The Sweetspot/Easy Tempo Session. This is tempting on paper. It’s below the unpleasant threshold/FTP [the power you can sustain for one hour] level of effort, but still usually shorter than an hour. Not too hard, not too long, and with substantial, if nebulous, fitness benefits promised. And this is exactly what it’s like in practice. But, curiously, only the first time you do it. Second time, even if it’s exactly the same ride, it will feel as if it lasts for ever. If you keep doing it, it will only get worse.
The Threshold Session. Ride at threshold/FTP for 40-60 minutes. This is horrible. It’s like being in race with none of the excitement, glory or bragging rights. A boxer trying to come up with the equivalent would just punch themselves in the face for 40 minutes. As an added bonus, the fitness benefits are pretty limited – mostly what they do is make you smell too bad to be allowed in the cafe. Most coaches only prescribe the session to promote “psychological resilience”. This just means that they’ve come to really hate you.
The Long Interval Session. Over threshold/FTP effort, probably in blocks of 8-20 minutes. A bit like the threshold session in that you’ll hate it and keep hating it. It has the added bonus that after you’ve discovered how unhappy the first effort makes you, you’ll know what you’re going to get in the rest of them.
The Short Interval Session. Way over threshold/FTP, but very short, probably less than a minute and perhaps only 10 seconds. These are deceptive. They sound so innocent. Only after several minutes will the full crescendo of horror reveal itself. These sessions produce a strange cognitive dissonance, because even as your vision goes to black and white, you’ll still try to persuade yourself they’re not that hard.
Unlike the sweetspot session, the short interval session has an autoamnesia function. You can never remember how terrible they are afterwards, probably due to a lack of oxygen to the brain.
Finally, there is The Gym. This is unpleasant because of one thing: people. It turns out that all the people who want to kill you with their car are on their way to the gym. In this environment they are, if anything, even less lovable than they are on the open road. They’ll hog machines, sweat over things, and seek attention by refusing to lift anything without making loud huffing noises.
By the way, don’t try the gym bike. It will make the tempo session feel as sweet and painless as a massage.
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