LC, the moment that you start stringing together serious endurance events for the year, it makes sense to construct not just a structured event training plan, but an Annual Training Plan. The harder the events get and the more of them that you do, the more urgent this becomes.
For harder events, your fitness and strength will peak, then some will rapidly fall away. Yet when you train for 12-24 weeks building it, it becomes tempting to tuck in another event before you lose too much awesome. As days grow warmer and longer, you'll find more opportunities to do so. Finish a second event, and you'll spot a third, perhaps three weeks away, and so on.
Jamming too many events together can quickly cramp recovery, overstrain your body and leave you exhausted and at risk of injury, while too far apart and you can spend a lot of time retraining that you didn't need to do. So a smarter way to do it is to list all the events that you *might* want to do across the season, and rate them by priority, e.g.:
A-ride: a ride you are keen to do as a highlight of your year;
B-ride: a ride you'd like to do as training for an A-ride;
C-ride: a ride you'd do either for enjoyment, or just to keep your fitness.
Where a weekly training plan schedules sessions, an annual training plan typically sketches weekly volume. It can be convenient to break volume into focused months of 'Base', 'Build', 'Peak' 'Event/Race' and 'Transition' to training for the next event. I've included an article from the training planning/tracking app Training Peaks, but there are others and you could even DIY on a spreadsheet. You'd need at least a heart-rate monitor and a fitness watch or bike computer to calculate weekly training volume, but a power meter is substantially better.
I can talk more about calculating training volume if you have interested. It doesn't matter much for individual rides, but matters a lot for week-on-week training, especially when you start chaining events.
Seems like solid advice. I don’t think I’ll add anything else between now and the Whistler GF. I’m pretty new to this, probably only have 1000km of cycling over my entire life in my legs :D and Whistler GF seems really intense so want to focus on that while still having fun with the riding. Who knows if I’ll even make it up the mountain, might have to get rescued by a helicopter halfway up haha!
LC, I understand and respect that you're disengaging from the socials while training, but I feel the need to finger-wag a bit as you do simply because I'm concerned. So here it comes... Ready?
By my sketch calculations this ride is going to see you in the saddle for more than six hours for the event, which makes it ultra-endurance cycling. That's not a community giggle-ride with a couple of days recovery -- it's a boss-level endurance event.
Posting that you're training for your first ultra event will bring out every ultra and former ultra rando on Substack out of the woodwork (which is exactly what you got with me.) Obviously, you can't trust Internet randos, but some will be both interested and genuinely concerned.
And you're right, ultra training isn't for the Insta/selfie crowd. It's making yourself permanently tired and sore for 20 weeks so you can do something that most people would say is impossible. (I've driven cycling friends over my ultra courses, and they've been in tears just looking at them.) You won't have energy to blog about it, and nobody wants to read "Sore, tired, tired, sore, just ate a Shetland pony and still hungry" anyway.
Ultras aren't for all cyclists. They're for people who really love training on their bike for 10+ hours a week; people who love grueling physical and mental tests; and people who are intensely competitive. (I'd say that any two of those is sufficient, but if you don't have at least two, there'll be more interesting things you could do with your time.)
Implicitly, with 1,000km in your legs you don't know yet whether that's you. Or you could say it another way: you mightn't know whether that's you ~this year~.
Unfortunately, the training requires you to assume that it is you from the first week, and if you're not up to building 11-15 hours training per week within the first 6-8 weeks, that'll be the first sign that it's not you this year. Anyone who's completed one of these will tell you to wait a year if you'd rather stay with 4-6 hours cycling per week (which is what I think of as the 'fit and fun' range. Past 8+ hours, and once you factor in recovery too it feels like a part-time job.)
But that's not my finger wag. My finger wag is about training alone when you don't know how to train. Your 'A+' advice from Reddit was to find people who want to train too -- I'd add, find people who are training for ultras. That's local cycling clubs and randonneur groups. Both groups ride the sort of distance/gain you're looking at with Whistler, but where cycling clubs would see that as a ceiling for a riding day, the randonneurs would see Whistler as a training ride for their 'real stuff'. 😝 As ultra specialists they're all barking mad, but nobody knows more about cycling ultras than randonneur groups do.
In any case, please find a group to train with, LC. I understand that emergency helicopters are comedic when they seem an improbable extreme, but for people like me who've done this stuff, I've actually seen that. People die on Everest; they die on ultras. I'm sparing you the anecdotes so as not to terrify you.
Please get an experienced group to train with, find them early and be careful.
I’m not sure where you got that I don’t plan to train with others and haven’t been doing some of my rides with more experienced people :) I just don’t want to add any more events to my plans without first successfully completing Whistler GF. I lived in Vancouver for many years and know that’s it’s a challenging course but still accessible and achievable by many types of cyclists. Thousands of people sign up for this course - most of them for a personal challenge and to experience one of the most beautiful highways in all of North America. I’ve driven the sea to sky highway multiple times and am looking forward to being able to ride it on a car-free day just like the slower 3000 or so cyclists who aren’t pro/elite level, and this blog is more for them than for highly trained athletes in any case! But I appreciate the nuggets of advice!
LC, I have just heard an influencer with one GF experience tell an experienced ultra-rider that he's making assumptions, when her own posts are peppered with assumptions that she has yet to recognise.
I won't burden you with my advice nor take further interest in your posts, but I still hope that you'll train with experienced ultra-riders (and not just experienced cyclists), and wish you the best.
Im not an influencer and I mean no disrespect. Most of my readers here are friends and family, many of whom are also newbie cyclists. I’m just an excited cyclist who is documenting her journey to see where this goes and keep getting better in small sustainable steps :) and you’re right many people start to share a lot of opinions when someone starts a new journey like this….and I’d say many internet articles say a lot of things (many times conflicting), most times most humans have to make their own mistakes and synthesize info their own way and go through their own experiences to learn. I am joining a cycling club to find more experienced folks, especially having moved to a new city. So your advice is being heard. I’m not sure why you’re sounding frustrated - but of course feel free to unfollow. Thanks for your advice so far
It's concern and not frustration, LC. Please understand that I put in tens of thousands of kms riding behind someone learning this stuff, as I had to learn it too. I am very familiar with the hopeful assumptions that we make, and how quickly reality disabuses us.
That person -- my late wife of 35 years -- died on the road. I was with her. It wasn't fatigue-related, but I'm aware of the fragility of cycling. Her death wasn't a one-off. I have ridden in multiple events that have lost riders. It's why they make you sign waivers.
The concern for me isn't that you won't complete this. It's that for your current level of experience and fitness, this is an ultra event for your body (as it is not for experienced club riders.)
You literally have no experience of what sort of fatigue you'll encounter doing this and what it can do to your coordination and decision-making.
I don't want to discourage you from doing a five-star difficulty event in year 1, but I am anxious that you don't go so far beyond your experience of exhaustion doing it that you make a life-changing or life-threatening mistake.
Obviously that's not about you but about any rider in your situation, but perhaps it's magnified because women in cycling face additional impediments and I admire you for charging past them.
Anyway, that's all that's motivating me here.
> feel free to unfollow
Already have. I understand and accept that the help you need can't come from me.
LC, the moment that you start stringing together serious endurance events for the year, it makes sense to construct not just a structured event training plan, but an Annual Training Plan. The harder the events get and the more of them that you do, the more urgent this becomes.
For harder events, your fitness and strength will peak, then some will rapidly fall away. Yet when you train for 12-24 weeks building it, it becomes tempting to tuck in another event before you lose too much awesome. As days grow warmer and longer, you'll find more opportunities to do so. Finish a second event, and you'll spot a third, perhaps three weeks away, and so on.
Jamming too many events together can quickly cramp recovery, overstrain your body and leave you exhausted and at risk of injury, while too far apart and you can spend a lot of time retraining that you didn't need to do. So a smarter way to do it is to list all the events that you *might* want to do across the season, and rate them by priority, e.g.:
A-ride: a ride you are keen to do as a highlight of your year;
B-ride: a ride you'd like to do as training for an A-ride;
C-ride: a ride you'd do either for enjoyment, or just to keep your fitness.
Where a weekly training plan schedules sessions, an annual training plan typically sketches weekly volume. It can be convenient to break volume into focused months of 'Base', 'Build', 'Peak' 'Event/Race' and 'Transition' to training for the next event. I've included an article from the training planning/tracking app Training Peaks, but there are others and you could even DIY on a spreadsheet. You'd need at least a heart-rate monitor and a fitness watch or bike computer to calculate weekly training volume, but a power meter is substantially better.
I can talk more about calculating training volume if you have interested. It doesn't matter much for individual rides, but matters a lot for week-on-week training, especially when you start chaining events.
https://www.trainingpeaks.com/learn/articles/the-comprehensive-guide-to-creating-an-annual-training-plan/
Seems like solid advice. I don’t think I’ll add anything else between now and the Whistler GF. I’m pretty new to this, probably only have 1000km of cycling over my entire life in my legs :D and Whistler GF seems really intense so want to focus on that while still having fun with the riding. Who knows if I’ll even make it up the mountain, might have to get rescued by a helicopter halfway up haha!
LC, I understand and respect that you're disengaging from the socials while training, but I feel the need to finger-wag a bit as you do simply because I'm concerned. So here it comes... Ready?
By my sketch calculations this ride is going to see you in the saddle for more than six hours for the event, which makes it ultra-endurance cycling. That's not a community giggle-ride with a couple of days recovery -- it's a boss-level endurance event.
Posting that you're training for your first ultra event will bring out every ultra and former ultra rando on Substack out of the woodwork (which is exactly what you got with me.) Obviously, you can't trust Internet randos, but some will be both interested and genuinely concerned.
And you're right, ultra training isn't for the Insta/selfie crowd. It's making yourself permanently tired and sore for 20 weeks so you can do something that most people would say is impossible. (I've driven cycling friends over my ultra courses, and they've been in tears just looking at them.) You won't have energy to blog about it, and nobody wants to read "Sore, tired, tired, sore, just ate a Shetland pony and still hungry" anyway.
Ultras aren't for all cyclists. They're for people who really love training on their bike for 10+ hours a week; people who love grueling physical and mental tests; and people who are intensely competitive. (I'd say that any two of those is sufficient, but if you don't have at least two, there'll be more interesting things you could do with your time.)
Implicitly, with 1,000km in your legs you don't know yet whether that's you. Or you could say it another way: you mightn't know whether that's you ~this year~.
Unfortunately, the training requires you to assume that it is you from the first week, and if you're not up to building 11-15 hours training per week within the first 6-8 weeks, that'll be the first sign that it's not you this year. Anyone who's completed one of these will tell you to wait a year if you'd rather stay with 4-6 hours cycling per week (which is what I think of as the 'fit and fun' range. Past 8+ hours, and once you factor in recovery too it feels like a part-time job.)
But that's not my finger wag. My finger wag is about training alone when you don't know how to train. Your 'A+' advice from Reddit was to find people who want to train too -- I'd add, find people who are training for ultras. That's local cycling clubs and randonneur groups. Both groups ride the sort of distance/gain you're looking at with Whistler, but where cycling clubs would see that as a ceiling for a riding day, the randonneurs would see Whistler as a training ride for their 'real stuff'. 😝 As ultra specialists they're all barking mad, but nobody knows more about cycling ultras than randonneur groups do.
In any case, please find a group to train with, LC. I understand that emergency helicopters are comedic when they seem an improbable extreme, but for people like me who've done this stuff, I've actually seen that. People die on Everest; they die on ultras. I'm sparing you the anecdotes so as not to terrify you.
Please get an experienced group to train with, find them early and be careful.
I’m not sure where you got that I don’t plan to train with others and haven’t been doing some of my rides with more experienced people :) I just don’t want to add any more events to my plans without first successfully completing Whistler GF. I lived in Vancouver for many years and know that’s it’s a challenging course but still accessible and achievable by many types of cyclists. Thousands of people sign up for this course - most of them for a personal challenge and to experience one of the most beautiful highways in all of North America. I’ve driven the sea to sky highway multiple times and am looking forward to being able to ride it on a car-free day just like the slower 3000 or so cyclists who aren’t pro/elite level, and this blog is more for them than for highly trained athletes in any case! But I appreciate the nuggets of advice!
LC, I have just heard an influencer with one GF experience tell an experienced ultra-rider that he's making assumptions, when her own posts are peppered with assumptions that she has yet to recognise.
I won't burden you with my advice nor take further interest in your posts, but I still hope that you'll train with experienced ultra-riders (and not just experienced cyclists), and wish you the best.
Im not an influencer and I mean no disrespect. Most of my readers here are friends and family, many of whom are also newbie cyclists. I’m just an excited cyclist who is documenting her journey to see where this goes and keep getting better in small sustainable steps :) and you’re right many people start to share a lot of opinions when someone starts a new journey like this….and I’d say many internet articles say a lot of things (many times conflicting), most times most humans have to make their own mistakes and synthesize info their own way and go through their own experiences to learn. I am joining a cycling club to find more experienced folks, especially having moved to a new city. So your advice is being heard. I’m not sure why you’re sounding frustrated - but of course feel free to unfollow. Thanks for your advice so far
> I’m not sure why you’re sounding frustrated
It's concern and not frustration, LC. Please understand that I put in tens of thousands of kms riding behind someone learning this stuff, as I had to learn it too. I am very familiar with the hopeful assumptions that we make, and how quickly reality disabuses us.
That person -- my late wife of 35 years -- died on the road. I was with her. It wasn't fatigue-related, but I'm aware of the fragility of cycling. Her death wasn't a one-off. I have ridden in multiple events that have lost riders. It's why they make you sign waivers.
The concern for me isn't that you won't complete this. It's that for your current level of experience and fitness, this is an ultra event for your body (as it is not for experienced club riders.)
You literally have no experience of what sort of fatigue you'll encounter doing this and what it can do to your coordination and decision-making.
I don't want to discourage you from doing a five-star difficulty event in year 1, but I am anxious that you don't go so far beyond your experience of exhaustion doing it that you make a life-changing or life-threatening mistake.
Obviously that's not about you but about any rider in your situation, but perhaps it's magnified because women in cycling face additional impediments and I admire you for charging past them.
Anyway, that's all that's motivating me here.
> feel free to unfollow
Already have. I understand and accept that the help you need can't come from me.
Very best wishes, RD.