I have a 25 mile each way commute which I normally ride in 1hr 30 at 80% there and take it easier home , I do this once or twice a week plus a MTB group ride on Tuesday evenings and with luck a weekend ride .
How can I use the commute as a training ride to gain speed ????
I have no trouble with endurance as can do a 5 hr ride no problem it’s just I’m never troubling the faster in the group even if they don’t ride as much as me

HIIT. 80% is training for 80% – you need to max it, back off, max it, back off.

Cursory Google Link 🙂

Don’t back off on the return leg and as above, do more higher intensity stuff

HIIT. 80% is training for 80% – you need to max it, back off, max it, back off.

Kinda depends what you want to do though. Training for say a TT race that would be ideal. If your target was say to do the commute in an hour then that would get you there eventually.

Interval training works but im not convinced it’s the best thing all year round. I dont race and even I feel like I need a break and nice slow base miles over the winter as an antiote to flogging myself all summer.

So if you’ve got time and no particular target events then Id just enjoy the commute at the moment. Mine used to be 25 each way from Reading into Staines. Its more than enough to make a serious impact on your fitness just by riding it. I really miss it now, but on the upside i actually have some time/energy to do other stuff!

Then by the end of March start thinking about intervals and training for any specific events. E.g. is there an XC series locally you want to be compettative in, then the intervals need to match the climbs in that. No point doing 1 minute intervals if you live at the bottom of Alp d’huez.

So if you’ve got time and no particular target events then Id just enjoy the commute at the moment. Mine used to be 25 each way from Reading into Staines. Its more than enough to make a serious impact on your fitness just by riding it. I really miss it now, but on the upside i actually have some time/energy to do other stuff!

This. A 25 mile each way commute is a fair bit at 80%. Slow down and enjoy it, your overall performance will increase. Then going out with the mates, use that as your intervals keeping up. You will recover quicker with them because of the base work.

Steady ride in, smash it on the way home!

Sprint or hill intervals on the way back. Quite hard to do on the road so you need some long stretches! And excellent traffic awareness of course – with that in mind smashing it on the way home is a dumb idea – be safe etc.

you need a plan with a goal as 25miles each way is a lot – I’d say a proper coach who knows what they are talking about is the best answer

Quite hard to do on the road so you need some long stretches! And excellent traffic awareness of course – with that in mind smashing it on the way home is a dumb idea – be safe etc.

I often found the opposite. In the mornings you got the impatient, running late or just plain dozy drivers doing stupid shit.

In the afternoon it was punishment passes, road rage and general abuse. Which whilst shit in a different way, is easier to deal with because you can ignore it.

Other benefits, like car drivers youre not aiming for a deadline (get to your office for 9am). Use that to your advantage and plan a quieter but hillier alternative route. Also I was always at least 1mph quicker in the evenings, and for intervals its the output that matters, not the perceived exertion.

I do a similar commute.

I have attempted to use the hills on the route for some ‘interval’ training but I end up knackered!

25+ miles in each direction plus 8 hours at work is more than enough even once or twice a week. I’ve decided, recently, to do intervals at the weekends and use the commute as ‘base miles’

I’m not trying to be flippant, but 80% of what? FTP? LTHR? Some other tangable stat that you are measuring with a device on your rides?

Speed is massively affected by things outside of your control, such as gradient; wind direction; junctions; traffic lights etc.

Heart rate can be massively affected by factors outside your exercise, such as stress levels; quality of sleep; caffeine intake; that close pass by a motor vehicle etc.

The elevation profile of your route could force your hand if you want to improve, if it’s mostly uphill on the way home for example, you are far more likly to be able to push yourself to your heart and power limits over various time durations on the way home.

I’m still stuck in a single sprocket on my road bike due to a snapped rear mech cable, so because my rides in the South Downs are quite undulating and the inclines can be anything up to ~15%, I’ve currently moved the sprockets around to use the 22T. Combined with the elevation profile up there, I’ve no chance of threatening the best 20mins power I’ve had in the last 6 weeks on the turbo. But over the last nine days while doing my first four road bike rides since early November, I’ve done my best 5sec, 1min and 5mins power efforts of the last six weeks up different inclines. Plus I can’t complain about the best 20mins I did considering the low gradient (~333 feet over ~5.8 miles, including a ~130 foot drop of freewheeling for just over a minute) and that compromise 50/22 gear.

There’s no way I could match the stats from this ~24.5 mile route from last week day in day out https://www.strava.com/activities/2978113711/overview .

But besides the cat4 hill effort, this ~27.5 mile route from last week was very comfortable, I could do that most days, but I suspect at some point I would need to take that cat4 at a much lower pace https://www.strava.com/activities/2973287784/overview

Sprint or hill intervals on the way back. Quite hard to do on the road so you need some long stretches! And excellent traffic awareness of course – with that in mind smashing it on the way home is a dumb idea – be safe etc.

Good advice. You need to do intervals, but commuting routes don’t usually suit interval work, unless you have reasonable stretches of uninterrupted cycling.

if you have a smartphone and quadlock get tabata timer app and program in some intervals.

Aim to go under the hour. The mark of a good clubman. Seriously, push harder if the roads allow it. If it’s all traffic lights, sprint hard from each one.

TiRed, not many clubmen I know who ride 25mph solo commutes to work, especially at this time of year and without knowing the elevation or traffic on the route. And I know a lot of good fast riders.
The way it looks is that the OP has trained himself to ride 25 miles comfortably. As said above that’s great for TT, less so for fast club rides where the pace can fluctuate from steady to fast, hard up hills, back to fast on the flat.
I would be doing intervals during the ride a couple of days a week, but also with some days of easy recovery rides.
An example….
Sunday hard club ride. Monday both journeys very easy (zone 2 max). Tuesday commute there, interval (over and unders). Commute home is recovery ride. Wednesday to work I’d take it very easy and the return would be a similar interval session, but this time max effort for 90 seconds into 60 second recovery, 5 sets, 5 mins recovery and then another 5 sets. Thursday and Friday would be easy tempo rides, z3 max. Then you’ll be rested enough for your Sunday ride.
I’m no expert but have followed enough training programmes to understand the basics.
Because your doing quite a bit of mileage I wouldn’t overdo the intervals or the 80 percent rides, rest is as important as a hard session.

Ok thanks people for the help , today I took the bike and went quite steady and averaged 156bpm on the way in but went flat out most of the way home with a steady headwind and averaged 169bpm for 1hr 26 and peaked at 186bpm (I’m 46 and my max is 193bpm). Also I’m new to road bikes and I’ve swapped the 25mm tires to 30/32mm Specialized Roubaix pro running them tubeless omg they are so much nicer to ride and faster on our crap roads .

This is about my commute and I used it to prep for a big road bike trip to the Alps. 2/3 of it is quiet lanes and 1/3 busier city, with about 300m climbing all in.

I realised that I just need to play it by ear. Morning is fasted before breakfast and evening is usually after a busy day at work, so I just decided to enjoy the time on the bike knowing I wasn’t stuck in the car. I’d usually build in an effort on a hill either way, but other than that, just take it steady and treat it as base miles and time on a bike. HR average is usually about 120 – 130, my max is about 185.

It’s still a lot of riding and when I occassionally rode in 3 x a week, I’d be really tired by the time I got to the weekend if I’d given it lots of effort during the week.

It all helped me lose some weight and generally be fine for the big trip. I think that was because it was low intensity riding and time spent riding a bike rather than eating crap food!!

TiRed, not many clubmen I know who ride 25mph solo commutes to work, especially at this time of year and without knowing the elevation or traffic on the route.

Whoosh!

Nobody is going to commute at 25 mph. My comment was facetious based on the distance. Going under the hour was the mark of a good club cyclists in the years before 10 mile TTs became popular. They are a relatively recent thing.

The rest of the advice was serious. Push harder on a couple of days and have a week off every one in four.

I’m still stuck in a single sprocket on my road bike due to a snapped rear mech cable, so because my rides in the South Downs are quite undulating and the inclines can be anything up to ~15%, I’ve currently moved the sprockets around to use the 22T.

I really hope you’re doing that because you like the SS not swapping sprockets about to save replacing a cable LOL!

OP, other advice here is good, have a plan, you will need hard and easy weeks to allow your body to recover and actually gain speed. Intervals are a good idea to improve MTB fitness, there aren’t many places you grind away for hours on an MTB. Make sure your hard weeks are hard and easy weeks are easy though!

The route is pretty flat 300ft either way and I ride it in the morning on a coffee then no carbs just sis tablets in my water . I’m only doing it a max of twice a week so not getting tired from the riding as such . But cheers for the input I’ll test a few things over the next few weeks and see how I come along.

I’m still stuck in a single sprocket on my road bike due to a snapped rear mech cable, so because my rides in the South Downs are quite undulating and the inclines can be anything up to ~15%, I’ve currently moved the sprockets around to use the 22T.

I really hope you’re doing that because you like the SS not swapping sprockets about to save replacing a cable LOL!

Definitely not about saving money for a replacement cable, I’ve had a nice “upgrade” DA gear cable kit with orange outers to match my Cube’s orange frame highlights (replacing 105 5800 cables) since at least early December!

I even bought some internal routing liner https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07Z4WQY7D/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00 from someone’s link in here last month too, but I forgot all about ordering a pair of nice and sharp cable cutters to have a go at it myself.

The old cable snapped months ago (September??!!?!), but as much as wasn’t riding outdoors on it back then, I could and did almost daily Zwift sessions (especially in ERG mode where I don’t need to change gear to match power targets).

Just simple everyday things are often a chore for me approx September-April, as is the case for many Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers. Part of my excuse is I feel I should have a go myself because it should be reasonably easy albeit it is an internal routed frame, but it’s also the “anxiety” of not having my road bike available to ride indoors or out if I book it into an LBS and a little bit the unknown of how much the LBS may charge.

Dual speed certainly helps encourage me to get a bit more out of myself, I didn’t realise it at the time, but while climbing a short sharp incline the other day that peaks at ~13.5% I got very close to doing a 500W 1min effort for the second time ever and the last was ~18 months ago when I having a great summer season https://www.strava.com/activities/2981715270/analysis/1849/1909

… But it would be nice to have 20 useable gears again!

Mine is 19 miles each way which I do 3 times per week in the winter (I only work 4 days). It’s a mix of B-road, A road and shared cyclepaths with about 20 traffic lights and roundabouts. Climbing is about 300m each way. In 2018 my average speed for this was about 26-28kph meaning the ride took about 60-70 minutes at an estimated average power of 120W. In the spring of 2019 I upped the number of times I rode to 4 and in the summer 2019 I used interval training to get my pace up to about from 27-28kph to 33-35kph without feeling too wiped out at the end of a week. This dropped my times to about 44-49 mintes, but the estimated average power was about 220-230W, so a substantial increase. My FTP is about 310w, so even this theoretically represents only about 75% max effort, but increasing this speed would result in substantial fatigue both at work and at home. Currently this “winter” my average is around 29-31kph which is taking between 54 and 60 minutes. Average power is estimated at around 140W. I don’t have a winter average for 2018 to compare to, but I am faster and less tired.