lungi, Haven't seen much in this thread about recovery. You can't get stronger unless you give your muscles lots of low-stress recovery time. If you're always riding in hard and never letting yourself recover then you're going to feel fatigued and not get much stronger. To get stronger, you have to overload and then recover long enough for your muscles to build.
What I'm doing now: Ride very slowly to work (10 hilly miles) should take 40+ minutes or I'm not riding easy enough; ride very slowly home (10 hilly and mostly uphill miles) should take 50 to 55 minutes or I'm not riding easy enough, ride very slowly to work, finally BOOM ride very hard intervals on the way home--30 to 40 seconds of maximum sprint and then rest long enough for my heart rate to drop to where I can do it again. I can do six to ten of these on the way home, depending on traffic on the trail, ending with two sprints on the way up the final big hill to my house. Then I'm back to three easy commutes before the hard evening of riding home. On the weekends I've been riding mostly 200km's the last couple of months. By the way, sometimes my ten-mile commute home feels like an eternity and I can't imagine how I'm going to ride a brevet that weekend. I'm ten years older than you, FWIW. On Tuesday, April 26, 2016 at 5:50:57 PM UTC-4, Lungimsam wrote: > > > Lately I have been thinking of riding to my body's needs. Letting it tell > me how fast or slow it wants to go while riding. Like recovering while on > the bike. And maybe my fitness will increase over time if I let my body > just ride how it wants on a given day. > Recently I was tired and just slowed till the mental tension was gone and > enjoyed the relaxation of just going slow. > It is amazing how far the bike will coast if you let it do the work, > instead of hammering on it. Just coasting over a hill crest is relaxing. > I recently lost my computer and am enjoying my riding more. Much more > mentally relaxing. No self-assumed pressure. As if. > > I like the Rando ideas of: > 1. Relentless forward motion > and > 2. Recover on the bike. > > I want to keep riding. I don't want to cut back. I want to ride more, but > I guess I'll let my body dictate what it is able to do on a given ride/day. > > Hopefully one day I will be able to be fast enough to finish Brevets in > time and I can do some shorter brevets and see how I like them. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
