I’m about to walk away from my bike for the first ½ of November and then focus on base training with lots of long endurance rides and gradually add intensity over the the following 10 weeks.
I’ve been training most of this year at what for me is a high degree of intensity with a CTL in the mid 80s snd lots of climbing at threshold.
I’m retired and have lots of time to train.
There are 40-50 mile group rides on Tuesdays and Thursdays that I enjoy. I like to push hard and stay with the fastest riders. Lots of Zone 5-7 efforts mixed in. 200+ TSS/ride is typical. I’m not bad at short punchy climbs and efforts.
Should I give these hard group ride efforts up for November and December and January during base training? I could do the group rides at an endurance pace. I live in Texas and can ride outdoors through most of the winter.
I’ll be substituting rowing and walking during the first ½ of November and have been increasing strength training lately which I will continue.
My goals are to continue to increase my stamina and strength on the bike. My A event is a week long bike camp next September culminating in a very hard Imperial century. B events are metric century birthday rides with friends some of whom are stronger than me.
Periodization is not proven to be that important, except for tapering.
And you will not loose your base in half a month .
So, why do you want the rest period?
I think it’s a good idea to take a couple of weeks off the bike at the end of the season.
I’m not worried about losing fitness. In fact, I’m sure I will.
It’s important to allow my body to come off its peak for a spell. I think It will help me build my fitness more next year.
My question is if twice weekly max effort group rides will interfere with that base building period.
Probably not. You develop your base with the low-intensity rides. The max effort group rides will developer you VO2max and peak power. Both can be combined, just make sure you give yourself sufficient recovery time after each training.
I like breaking up the year too for mental freshness. If I were in your cleats, I would try for longest rides and most miles per week PBs during this period. This will help your stamina. A fast ride every week or two would help you see if you are losing too much top end.
I’m in more or less the same situation. The main problem I’ve found is that I am increasingly finding it difficult to recover from them sufficiently to get any meaningful training in for at least a couple of days after them, particularly if I go on 2 of them in a week . The trouble is I really enjoy both the ride and the company.
This time of year I just do the hard efforts once a week. Experience says that’s enough for me to not lose too much of my top end. Once I get to Jan I’ll get back to twice a week intensity.
Agreed. While we don’t have to call it periodization, taking these planned breaks are good for more than just adjusting training loads. This time of year it can still be important to get the social benefits of the group rides. My suggestion for you @CCR_TX is to bring them to 1x every 7-10 days. That has been a long-time default for me and any athletes I’ve coached anytime we’re backing things down, working on base, etc. It allows you to have that focus of developing the things you want to develop, and takes into account @carytb’s suggestion of potential issues in recovering adequately between group rides.