I provide my clients with a lot of interval work on the bike in the winter months.  That’s right, intervals in the winter, and they can be intense!  And wait, I also give em running intervals and tempo efforts!!!  I know this may go against conventional wisdom that the winter and preseason is the time to build your base and do slow, easy miles, but in my opinion, that way of training is old and outdated, especially for busy people who have a limited amount of time to get in their training each week. 

So what about the science behind training your capillaries to be aerobic and not tainting them with lactic acid through intervals in the early season?  There are cycling traditionists who will not do any cycling above 80% of their VO2 max before getting in a certain amount of mileage each preseason.  The truth is that this is very old school and many cyclists and triathletes trust this advice yet they’d be faster if they trained a bit more intensely in the preseason.  If logging tons of mileage makes you fast, than how come ultracyclists, you know, the guys that train for RAAM and such aren’t winning the Tour or the Spring Classics?  How come most of the best marathoners in the world come from a track background?  Chris McCormack, the recent Hawaii IM champ came from a short course background. 

I remember my first century ride.  I went out with Mike Kerin who was training for an IM at the time.  Up until this one, my longest ride had been maybe 40 miles, give or take a couple.  But I rode a weekly road ride on Tuesday evenings in Southbury that was very intense, and on Thursdays, I would do hill repeats or two to four minute intervals at or slightly above my LT, and I also did a weekly Saturday morning 8 mile TT at a very intense effort.  In the winter, I rode my trainer, never more than an hour, but always doing some type of intervals, whether they were 20 second sprints or 10 min LT efforts.  I remember averaging just over 20 miles per hour for the century and I felt strong the whole time.  The years I trained mostly at a slower, aerobic effort for IM’s but put in lots of volume, well, guess what?  Those were my slower IM years.

What about burning out or peaking way too early?  The key is to keep the intense sessions shorter.  Long sessions fatigue us more than hard short efforts, and long hard sessions are the ones that can really break you down.  Begin adding shorter intervals into your trainer rides and take a longer recovery in between these intervals.  Then, as you progress into the season, lengthen the intervals.  Build up to the point where you are doing three different interval sessions on the bike each week: one session of short, VO2 max effort intervals  from 20 sec to 1 min in duration, at a high rpm and with a recovery time of 150 to 200% of the interval time.  One session of LT intervals ranging from 2 to 4 minutes in length and with recovery at approximately 100% of the interval time.  Then one session with longer intervals ranging from 8 to 20 minutes at 10 to 15 beats below your LT.  Again, build these up as you go and keep the total workout to 1 hour in duration or less.  If you intend on doing a certain session and it’s just not happening early on in the workout, than bag it and ride easy that day.  Listen to the signs your body sends.  Then, when the nice weather comes around, and you get closer to you’re A race, start going longer.  You’ll be surprised at how much faster you ride the longer rides! 

The biggest problem with following this program is that there are too many so-called experts out there clouding the internet with information.  Athletes listen to them as well as their no-it-all friends and develop doubt in a program like this before even trying it!  If you want to put in long, boring useless hours on the trainer the next couple of months, thinking that this is what’s going to make you faster, be my guest.  If you want to optimize your time, make the sessions more fun, and ride stronger when you get outside and when you start racing, than add some intervals to your weekly rides – but just remember to back off the volume. 

Trust me!  One of my athletes did last year, never riding more than 4 hrs and 15 minutes in an outdoor session on his build to IM Florida, but doing lots of fun intervals on his computrainer, and he not only rode fast there, but went sub 9:45 to boot.

Cheers,

EH