I am going to start a training program that I did back when I was in high school but there may be a few changes. In high school I did this:
Monday-rest
Tuesday-sprints
Wednesday-endurance
Thursday-intervals at lactate threshold
Friday-rest
Saturday-race
Sunday-recovery ride
The training I have been doing right now is similiar but I don't do a sprint workout anymore so it looks like this:
Monday-rest
Tuesday-intervals
Wednesday-rest
Thursday-Endurance
Friday-rest
Saturday-race
Sunday-recovery ride
.....I have been thinking in the last few months that I NEED to add a sprint workout! Because it really helps with your training when you are racing. In the past few years, I have just been too lazy to do so. And back in high school I was doing sprints and I saw a major fitness gain and I need to do these again to see what happens now. Doing a sprint workout in my opinion is harder than doing a race, especially when it's in the first of the week.
This is the schedule I want to start doing right now:
Monday-rest
Tuesday-sprints
Wednesday-intervals at lactate threshold
Thursday-endurance
Friday-rest
Saturday-race
Sunday-recovery ride
The kind of sprints I do will be on an gradual climb at about 8% grade. So doing on that kind of grade would really kill you, doing a sprint like that should last 30 seconds and do about 4-6 of them. On a flat road, I can do it for a minute but I think I can get a better sprint workout on a hill.
On lactate threshold intervals, they should last 10 -30 minutes then recover then do it again. Depends how long my intervals are. If they are short, I do a bunch of them, and if they are long, I do only a few. It's just the kind of ride I do out there that I get adjusted to. Somtimes when I go up the canyon road, I do a long interval at 45 minutes to an hour and that's the longest my body will do. If I was doing shorter ones, I could crank up the intensity. It depends what I want to do that day. I always do these intervals on climbs.
On the endurance miles, I like just go for 2 hours at low intensity. I have some perfect rides around here on both dirt roads or pavement. Some people go for 3-4 hours but I have to work a lot and I don't have the time to go that long so 1-2 hours sounds more reasonable to me.
One mistake I did in high school was that I didn't do my training in blocks. So I was overtrained. In order do the right kind of training, I need to do building for 3 weeks then use the 4th week for a recovery or rest week. Then build again, then recover. Then again. Then race and peak.
There are 5 different training phases throughout the year which are:
Base training
Build
Race/Peak
Transition
Crosstraining
So this season the only difference I am making is adding a sprint workout each week during the build weeks and lets see what happens. Hopefully it'll turn out!
