Personally I’ve not been doing the 30 mile training thing. I’ve been doing short intervals, with reps of about 10.

I was going to ride out to the circuit this week to get a feel for it, but it does look like a very good course. Atleast the speed bumps aren’t the ones which you have to slow right down for. Thanks for the data aswell, I didn’t notice there was a hill on the course either.

If we aren’t able to race, I still may ride out there to watch.

Should be a good test for your new wheels! Good luck fellas, see you on the 26th

Quality vs quantity is interesting, would you suggest that we cut longer rides completely or reduce the frequency of them?

I’m doing 7 minute on, 8 minute off intervals at the minute, around zone 5, I’ll reduce to your 4×5 min plan in a couple of weeks. I think we might reduce the bet to sticking to some sort of riding every day, not just 30 miles. Our club tt’s start soon which I’m going to try and do a lot of, that’s half hours racing effort each week, plus a 40 minute TT training session every week. I think the only reason we’ve targetted this race is because it’s far enough away that we have time and close enough that we wont lose focus. The rest of the year for me now is just getting as close to being race fit as possible even though I’ve lost a lot of time, then I’ll start again for next season. Your comment has got me thinking about structuring this now though, I might email you a plan for some comments soon.

Appreciate your advice on this.

A 50 km ride will take around 1hr 30min to complete whereas criteriums are generally only 1hr or so long. So not only are you burning yourselves out by overtraining, you are also spending unnecessary time on the bike when you could be out partying/catching up on schoolwork or whatever. A good motto for you guys to take on board could be quality not quantity as it seems that you are focussing more on the overall distance and intensity of your rides rather than perhaps riding in specific heart rate zones for certain rides/ stages during a ride.

Some good intervals for you two to try could be 4x5min at hr zone 5a with 5 min active recovery after each interval. This will give you at least 40 min ride time without taking into account a warm up and cool down. Another interval could be 20 min efforts in zone 5a with 15 min recovery in between and repeat 2 or 3 times. N.B. Zone 5a is similar to ‘semi race pace’ as you put it if you haven’t worked out your heart rate zones yet.

Overall though guys I am a fan of what you have done with this blog and if you need any further information with training or whatever send me an email.