Triathlon: Endurance Bike Rides

Triathlon: Endurance Bike Rides

The Ironman bike. 112 miles. 180k.

What might training look like for this?

The first thing to say is when it comes to race day, we want to be ‘bike fit’. We want to be strong on the bike. We want to be able to finish the ride on race day and feel ‘ok’. A poor Ironman run is usually because of lack of robust bike fitness (and / or pushing too hard on the bike).

There are lots of ways to achieve this bike fitness.

Assuming we are doing our interval sessions during the week (e.g. big gear, sweetspot, VO2 Max), we need to think about our endurance, about our ability to sit on the saddle and ride 180k, our ability to hold our race position for this length of time too.

This means we need to think about our long rides.

Below are a few things to think about when planning our long / endurance rides, and some ways to build that bike fitness if long stretches of time to fit in these rides are not available.

Long Rides

What does a long ride look like? Personally, I think anywhere over 4 hours / 100k is a nice long ride. This is an arbitrary number, a nice round number, that I’ve picked out – for me, it gives us a long time in the saddle but is usually quite manageable for most athletes. Ideally, these types of rides should be the norm once we get into Spring. We can build some great endurance and bike strength, as well as practice hydration and fuelling. As we get fitter and stronger, we can often push the pace for long sections here too.

Century Rides

Sprinkled in our bike training should be some century rides, some rides of 100 miles plus. How many of these depends on what your life looks like and how much time you can afford (as they can often take 6-7 hours). At least one should be included. If you can fit in three or four (or more), great!

Long Rides With Race Pace Efforts

As our long rides develop, and we are comfortable riding for a long time at an easy / steady pace, we can include some time above steady / zone 2. Some intervals mid-ride such as 4 x 15 minutes at top of zone 3 / bottom of zone 4 (comfortably hard) are good.

As we get closer to Ironman race day, the ride might include some time at race pace and some time above it – e.g. 1 hour at race pace (zone 2) and in race position followed by 15 minutes pushing the pace / hill climb and then 15 minutes easy. You might do this twice through.

There are lots of variations on this.

Double Bike Days

Not all athletes have time for 4-6 hour rides, certainly not every week. They may have some time in the morning and in the evening. In this case, some double bike days are used. We might do some strength on the bike (big gear or hill climb work) or some sweetspot efforts in the morning, followed by some steadier work in the second session of the day. This could look like two hours in the morning, 90 minutes in the evening.

If you don’t have time in your life for long bike days, these types of sessions are a good substitute. Again, there are many ways to design these sessions to fit your life.

Hilly Rides

Not a substitute for endurance work, but definitely a type of ride that will help us to feel strong at the end of the 180k Ironman bike leg. Hills are our friends. Building that leg strength, that power on the bike, over a prolonged time at various (often unknown) points in the ride – and then ‘recovering’ whilst riding along the flat. Hills also teach us valuable descending skills too.

My general rule of thumb is if you are at a junction and you see hills to the left, flat roads to the right … go left.

Sportives

Organised rides around a set route, usually involving some hills, are great for making sure the long ride gets done. You enter the sportive in advance, pay your money and put it in the calendar. These two things tend to ensure the ride is not missed. These rides almost always have well-stocked feed stations too and can be quite a social day out.

If you are an athlete who has good intentions to do long rides, but never quite manages to get them done, then an organised Sportive or two might be the answer for you!

Multiple Days

Again, if you don’t have time for a long bike, then three days (Friday, Saturday, Sunday perhaps – or a bank holiday weekend) of consecutive bike sessions is another good option. We can play around with this, depending on how much time you have available, but it could be 2 hours on Friday, 3 hours on Saturday and 2 hours on Sunday. Seven hours of cycling over a short space of time.

If time is not really an issue for you, we could do 4 hours on Friday, 6 hours on Saturday and 3 hours on Sunday. A really big weekend!

Depending on where we are in the season, we can play around with different intensities too.

Endurance Block

This is a two or three week block, in the middle of an athletes programme, where we drop intensity and do some longer sessions. All done at a steady pace, with the aim of accumulating a little more volume than the athlete’s typical week.

This could include a mix of slightly longer bike sessions – 90 minutes instead of the usual 60, some double bike days – 60 minutes in the morning and 60 minutes in the evening, some consecutive days of riding (Friday, Saturday & Sunday).

A real endurance boost!

Big Days

This isn’t just about the bike now, it’s more of a race preparation ‘session’. We want to do three long sessions over the course of the day.

A long swim in the morning – around 3,000m. This can be in the pool or open water and should include some work at race pace.

Then, after a break where you recover, change and get something to eat, you want to go out for a long ride. A 4 hour ride (or slightly more if you have time) with a lot of work at race pace, thinking about race nutrition etc.

Again, take a little time for recovery – shower, change, something to eat – then you are going out for a long run (90 minutes or so) at proposed race pace and race strategy (i.e. run-walk). All the while, practising fuelling and seeing what ‘race pace’ feels like. If the run feels hard, then we need to look at bike pacing, run pacing & fuelling on the bike – or probably all three!

I don’t use this type of day with every athlete – all depends on their life and their time available – but it can be a useful session to do.

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I hope this post gives you a few ideas and you can use some of the approaches I’ve identified above. Are there any other types of rides or methods that have worked for you?

A quick note here to say that these approaches are not limited to Ironman bike training. We can adopt these types of approaches for Ironman 70.3 or even Olympic Distance triathlons.

Triathlon: Endurance Bike Rides

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