I keep cycling through the winter and do 2 mid week 2 hour 30 mile rides and one 30+ mile weekend ride. I try to mix things up and cycle in all HR zones from 2 right through to near max hr. Trouble is I don’t find I get any quicker and feel like I am going backwards. I and am starting to feel like it’s a lot of effort just to maintain fitness for my summer mountain biking and cycle touring trips.

Would a structured plan help or is there no quick win approach for getting endurance fit aside from just building hours in the saddle?

I also seem to lose my endurance fitness quickly too. Have done Tour Aotearoa in 2017 and St Malo to Nice 2018. Both of which involved 70 – 110 mile days. At the time it was hard and although consecutive days were tough I would say I enjoyed it. I haven’t stopped riding, but at the moment a 40 mile ride leaves me feeling pretty spent and not feeling like I want to ride the next day.

I have always had a high HR and my AT is 165, max 193 and average rides are ~ 143 bpm. I just look at my bike and the HR is 120! I am 48. I wonder whether it is the higher HR that is just leaving me tired and I need to go even slower.

If there was one answer to this there would be no work for the megabucks sports coaches, scientists etc. Short answer is theres a thousand things that can cause this including time of year, illness, stress, hormones, diet, training regime, waning interest/motivation, i.e real life happens.

Every time I’ve felt like that I’ve forgot about fitness for a short while and just focused on enjoying it, then the passion comes back and I can dig in hard and train.

I’m 48 as well and use the worst of Winter weather a s a good time to diversify into circuit and strength training. I don’t obsessively log any improvements but a change being as good as a rest seems to apply here.
I can also highly recommend Vit D tablets as an aid to avoiding lethargy. I work nights, so I’m an extreme example, but they’ve really helped my energy levels in the darker months.

On reflection I agree that everyone is different so there is not a one stop generic solution. I do incorporate gym and strength training, but 3 rides a week and one gym session is enough for me. If I try and do 2 gym and 3 rides it’s too much. I did really enjoy the strength training; squats, dead lifts, but had to curb them after 4 years as I developed a problem with my SI joint. Pyhsio said I had a weak glute medius and minimus so have now started on lateral work. Also seem to pick up many more niggles in the gym even though I’m not doing anything different.

Vit D, Cod liver and Q10 are already part of my daily routine.

To improve you will have to push yourself harder. You’re probably at equilibrium for your efforts. Instead, go a little harder on three weeks and drop two long rides on the fourth. Riding in a higher gear will help. It’s one reason why I ride fixed, because on 82” you can’t bimble along.

I have fixed routes of 100 km, which I use for timing. As well as a power meter. Repeating the same route helps with pacing.

i find I have to have more fuel during the ride in the winter or I feel wasted after .

To improve you will have to push yourself harder. You’re probably at equilibrium for your efforts. Instead, go a little harder on three weeks and drop two long rides on the fourth. Riding in a higher gear will help. It’s one reason why I ride fixed, because on 82” you can’t bimble along.

I do tend to just do the thing same week in week out so that is worth trying. Interesting point about riding in a higher gear. I recently put a 11/40 coupled with a 50/36 on my road bike to enable high cadence on hills, but that does mean you don’t works the quads as much as a higher gear. Last night I decided to climb one of the steep climbs a couple of cogs down just to feel it in the legs more.

i find I have to have more fuel during the ride in the winter or I feel wasted after .

Guilty of probably not fueling enough whilst riding. 3 hours last night and it was 2 scoops of high 5 in one bottle and 1 in the other, coupled with a naked bar mid ride. Always tricky to know how much to eat whilst riding, especially on rides > 2 hours.

I can’t remember the specifics, but I was browsing the Zwift workouts recently and there was one targeting mitochondria increase that help on endurance rides by doing numerous short reps of approx 1min at ~110% FTP with recovery periods.

Cannot recall if it was simply a warm up, the reps and cool down over ~55mins, or whether there were other intervals.

I’ll try and remember to make a note of specifics next time I run Zwift, not done much recently and actually ridden the road bike four times on 20-36 mile rides over the last eight days and getting some encouraging sub ~7min power numbers… Poor bike frame is filthy!

Get a copy of Joe Friel’s MTB or Cyclists Training Bible and work your way through it…..

Riding the same old rides at random HRs through winter will get you absolutely nowhere, (Which to be fair you’ve noticed!)

If you haven’t got the time or inclination to develop the understanding yourself, find someone who already understands. Maybe a coach?

Not all coaches will want you to sign up to their £150-a-month platinum package nonsense 🙂

As a coach I’d happily do a one-off ‘consultation’ approach to point you in the right direction. richard@laatsterondecoaching.co.uk if you’re interested

Rich

I thought the whole point of winter is to de-train? At least initially for a month or so, rest up then start building base fitness again with long slow rides. As always, depends what you are training for, when you want to peak etc. If you are just training to ride then does it really matter.

I think you’re doing too much. This time of year I’m doing. 1 balance session with squats an a dumbell for 1/2 hour and maybe 1 or 2 1 hour zone 2 ride on rollers and a couple of hours on the MTB at the weekend.

Turbo trainer based smash fest and race CX to build some most excellent speed, then top up the endurance with longer rides in nicer weather.

2 mid week 2 hour 30 mile rides and one 30+ mile weekend ride. I try to mix things up and cycle in all HR zones from 2 right through to near max hr. Trouble is I don’t find I get any quicker and feel like I am going backwards.

IME, the basics are about % time spent at different pace, and how each ride is structured. If you could up that weekend ride to >4hrs (if on road – 30 mile off-road probably is 3-4hrs) and make one of those 2.5hr mid week rides shorter, for no more time on the bike I think you could have a better base to work from in the spring. The longer ride should be Z2 only and the shorter ride as hard as it can be. The 2.5 hr ride maybe just for fun, without wearing yourself out. Others with more training exp may suggest a better use of that time (I’d go out on my SS MTB for variety and some strength). Base miles has been de-bunked as a requirement but personally I always have a better year after slowing down over winter, riding longer and steadier with only one short harder ride a week, max. Also, if the 2.5hr ride was done before breakfast on empty that can aid endurance ability.
Basically, some rides need to be slow and steady and some (10-15% of the weekly bike time) need to be really hard – mixed pace every time won’t get you further than a certain level.

Thanks for the posts here. Certainly a lot to digest and to consider when trying to come up with a plan for the next 12 weeks until the end of March. Would be great to create a structured plan for that period so I can get the maximum out of it.

Given my goal is multi day cycling trips and long days I just need to work out what is the best approach given the time I have, eg 2 * 2 hour week slots and the weekend.

From what people have said though I get the impression that I need to do more slow cadence high gear work rather than keeping cadence always high + 90 rpm.

I think base miles have value – unsurprisingly, they aren’t favoured by people who want to sell you expensive training equipment, gym memberships, detailed training plans involving spreadsheets that track your heart rate, and other such devices. Outside is free etc etc, and training on the road batters you less.

My standard response to questions like this is that most people don’t work hard enough or rest easy enough. So rather than their workouts being 8/10 and their rests/recovery being 2/10 their efforts are 6/10 and recoveries 5/10. Which is sort of numbers to what @jameso said.

It may well be that you’ve just worn yourself down, it’s quite easy to do without realising it – commute times drop by 1 minute a month or whatever. You then think you need to do hard efforts to get the fitness/speed back when it’s really the exact opposite that will have more beneficial effects. A few years ago after he won the Tour Divide, Josh Kato said he took six months off the bike other than trundling down to the local river to do a bit of fishing. Also something that Mike Hall noted about long distance rides – once you know you can do 100+ mile days back to back then there’s no need to do them in training as you just beat yourself up. The only exception to that might be if you get a new bike/saddle/bars and you need to check that it doesn’t cause you pain.

As you get older you start to need more recovery time, you just do. Even within rides I can’t recover from efforts as quickly as I used to be able to do in my twenties so whereas back then a 16% easing in a 25% climb would let me recover now it’s just more effort over my limit.

Given your time restraints I’d look at one gym session – a mixture of weights and turbo trainer/Watt bike if the gym has them, something like hill reps or fartlek for the other midweek session then long steady rides at the weekend in Z1 with a café stop or two. This would give you the 90-10 split mentioned by James.

I’m 63 and find that 30 miles in 2 hours is about the optimum ride length for me. One of those a week as well as a full-on 17 mile fast midweek night ride are sufficient to keep me fit through the winter and I know that if I did more than that I would be on a downhill slope to tiredness. If you are 43 your stamina and strength are beginning to decline and you need to recognise that the improvement happens in the resting phase BETWEEN the bouts of exercise. I would say that three rides a week is too much and you are tiring yourself out, which explains the symptoms you describe.

When summer arrives you need to concentrate on quality rather than quantity; go back to cycling as a hobby and a means of exploring the countryside, not a mad dash to get even fitter.

Giving up beer will help with weight loss, if that’s an issue.

Base miles has been de-bunked as a requirement but personally I always have a better year after slowing down over winter, riding longer and steadier with only one short harder ride a week, max.

It sounds like the “debunked” requirement works for you…

I think the idea of junk miles (i.e. trundling round just trying to record a fixed distance) has long been dismissed, but there is still value in getting good quality endurance hours over the winter, especially if your objective is longer distance endurance events in the summer. Most people would find it hard to maintain the same intensity of training all year, especially if you are training properly.

A structured programme could help optimise your training, and a good coach should be able to help you avoid the feeling of going backwards that you are reporting. Sometimes knowing when not to train is as important as training.

It sounds like the “debunked” requirement works for you…

Debunked only in that (as I understand it) the same gains can come from different patterns that take less time but more HI work, so not as essential as old roadie wisdom might suggest. For me it works as I have the time and enjoy the steady miles, also for endurance/distance riding I think the long steady miles also help with the comfort and mental aspects. ie,

there is still value in getting good quality endurance hours over the winter, especially if your objective is longer distance endurance events in the summer. Most people would find it hard to maintain the same intensity of training all year, especially if you are training properly.

..exactly that, ime.

a plan for the next 12 weeks until the end of March

12 weeks can the ideal base period, then 12 weeks build, based on Joe Friels training patterns. Worth looking up his blog for the basics on it, zones, etc. I found I could work that type of pattern into my riding without it feeling like training, just having an awareness of what type of riding does what, what proportions it should be, etc made a useful difference. The next step up was from understanding how to do a proper session on the turbo for the build period.

Tons of bollocks on this thread.

Buy this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cyclists-Training-Bible-Worlds-Comprehensive/dp/1937715825/ref=dp_ob_title_sports and read it. Then you’ll have a good place to start.

Simply trying harder doesn’t necessarily help. You need periodisation otherwise you reach equilibrium as you appear to have done. Base miles aren’t necessarily a bad thing depending on where you are, your body, what you’re trying to achieve and what you’ve been doing previously.

From what people have said though I get the impression that I need to do more slow cadence high gear work rather than keeping cadence always high + 90 rpm.

Not IMO. That kind of thing is just a targeted training thing you might do on a few sessions – it’s not a catch all to make you ‘better’. It’s very complicated, there’s a lot of things going on in our bodies when we ride bikes – which is why you need to read books not forum posts.

I don’t really “train” anymore, just enjoy riding the bike. Last winter I managed to miss most of it by going to Gran Canaria in December, Spain in January and the Azores in February!

Most of the last few years I’ve mixed it up by doing indoor track sessions and also going swimming once a week. How much it did for my actual fitness I don’t really know but it got me riding rather than plugging around in the dark/wet/cold.

I generally found that the only way to get properly fit was to do some early season circuit races and use those to get me into shape. Three races where I’d be a bit shit and then suddenly it’d all come back.

Long Z2 rides are better for base, just that most people with say 8 hours total training time per week don’t get enough done due to the time constraints.

Hence the shift to sweetspot base, more suited to time crunched than a polarised 80/20 model.