I’m working on building up my base aerobic fitness. This is involving lots of road riding with my HR in my aerobic zone for a period of time.

I imagine a number of you have done this and are quite familiar with the process. I’ve got a few questions…

1. If I do 4 exercise sessions each week – 3 of them base building then one just a general MTB ride where my HR goes way above my aerobic zone, is this going to bugger up my long term success? ie should I keep base building for a period of time before doing any exercise outside of my aerobic zone?

2. If I am base building and staying in the zone for all my exercise sessions – how long should I do it for a month? 6 weeks or longer?

3. While out on the bike, if my HR creeps over the upper limit of my aerobic zone – ie when climbing or avoiding cars – will this impact my success – ie should I be super disciplined to keep it below this upper limit at all costs?

I do my base miles at sub 70% hr, with a 90+ cadence, to stay in this range you need to keep the speed low, if I’m out with friends or club run then we normally have a mad half hour, I don’t worry about it and just have fun. Are you working towards a specific goal?

What are you training for?

If its “base” so that you can ride with mates without being last/left for dead, then 1 and 3 are “no”.

I’ve been ill for 18 months and just recovering, during this time I’m lost both my fitness and part of my condition has led me to also lose my confidence in my physical abilities (not skills but ability to recover).

So I’m not really training for anything specific other than to prove I can ride and recover and also to enable me to know I can ride for 3-4 hours again without having any nasty side effects.

Part of the onset of my condition was due to overtraining and not listening to my body so I’m really keen to do it properly this time so I don’t relapse.

1. No, one multi-zone ride a week shouldn’t bugger up your base efforts. You’re aiming for a cumulative effort where time spent in the endurance zone (significantly) exceeds all the others. See Friel: http://www.joefrielsblog.com/2011/11/early-base-zone-2-intensity.html
2. The short answer is that after a length of time (dependent on the base fitness you had going in to your training, but I would say definitely longer than 6 weeks, IME) your improvements will plateau. At that point it’s time to up the intensity. Obviously, you need a way of measuring your performance to tell whether you’re plateauing or not, so again, I’d be tempted to turn to Friel: http://www.joefrielsblog.com/2011/01/comparing-output-and-input.html
3. See answer 1. However, I would be trying to keep my HR inside threshold on the climbs as much as possible. It feels like you’re crawling to start with, but you’ll gradually get faster and faster for a given HR.

Yeah I’d go +1 for bomba’s answer

coming back from a long illness is really frustrating, the temptation is to push too hard too early, might be worth swapping one of your base rides for a recovery ride, just to be on the safe side…

Thanks for the input – looks like I’ll be OK mixing it up as long as I keep the majority aerobic.