Club Rides and Base Training

Following on from the chaotic club ride last Saturday I thought it appropriate to send out a note as to why base training is important and how we should go about it. Base training is the foundation for all the hard training that we do pre-season and during the race season. Go hard during base training and you’ll go fast for a short while and you’ll build aerobic fitness that will last a short time and then taper off. Then when it comes to the times when you need to draw on that aerobic fitness it won’t be there.

The benefits of aerobic training are an increase in aerobic endurance. We achieve this by lots of Long Steady Distance (LSD) training which we do predominantly in zone 1 and zone 2. I saw numerous downloads from HRM’s from last weeks club ride and I can tell by listening to breathing and conversation that last Saturdays ride was not zone 1 and 2 for most of the riders.

Riding in zone 3 (tempo) has the lowest return as far as adaptation from training. We will gain most by doing our base training at a comfortable pace and then when it comes to doing the Short Term Muscular Endurance (STME) intervals that we need to build race / TT speed and raise our LTHR we can do those harder. In summary, make your easy sessions easier and your hard sessions harder. Don’t ride medium hard all the time if you want to make progress.

There is also another key point about riding too hard on the base rides, the net effect is that the group becomes fragmented and instead of looking like a skilled and polished team of club cyclists we look like a rabble of tourists or sportive riders. Part of the club rides is about improving skills, group riding ability and ensuring that the stronger riders take more responsibility for taking the wind and that they have the skill to maintain the appropriate pace.

I shall be away on training camp or on courses for the next three Saturdays so can I please ask the experienced riders in the club to take responsibility for controlling the pace of the group, keeping the group together and following the scheduled route.

I look forward to resuming riding with the group in April and seeing a well drilled team of expert riders.

Barry