Cycling Specific Endurance Workouts

Gordo's Guide To Going Long: Part Seven

This session is the special sauce to prepare your body to race, and set yourself up for a successful marathon.

Use this session to set a ceiling performance

Then ride underneath this performance on race day.

Start by pulling together your key workouts and current season race data.

In your race data, if you didn’t run well off the bike, make sure to note. To have valid bike references, you need to be running well in your races.

---

My Key Data

During my Endurance & Strength block, I completed:

• Duration: Three long rides of 100%, 130% and 150% of the kilojoules (kJ) expected at my Ironman Race

• Intensity: A best-effort granfondo, a four-hour race (253w AP / 266w NP).¹

At the end of my Endurance & Strength block, I headed to Helsinki for lab testing and we confirmed my Green Zone as 200 to 240w.

Between my VO2 Block and my Endurance & Strength Block, I won my age group (M55-59) at Oceanside 70.3 (231w AP / 241w NP, 2:29 bike split). I ran great off this ride (1:29).

On Challenge Roth race day, I expect my LT1 will be ~230w (~3 watts per kilo).

Taking all of the above together, I’ve defined race effort as ~230w

---

Make Training More Challenging Than Race Day

Three key components to be completed to prepare for race day.

1. Duration: An over distance ride of 150% of race kJ (5,500 kJ).

2. Intensity: A four-hour bike race (or B-Priority 70.3 Race)

3. Duration & Intensity: The specific-endurance ride I outline below.

These workouts progressed my fitness as follows:

1. More work than required on race day.

2. More intense than required on race day.

3. More work and more intense than race day.

The goal being to make the race day bike feel routine then…

…get off the bike and run a fabulous marathon.