Training Schedule

Oddly enough, tours longer than one week require less training than shorter ones because you can do a substantial amount of training on the road! Care to join us for a couple weeks? Here's some training tips that we use from The Essential Touring Cyclist by Richard A. Lovett.

Your training goal should be to gradually build up to a weekly mileage that will allow you to take longer day rides or easy weekend tours without additional training.

You could do the build-up in stages, stopping at one level for a few weeks before increasing to a higher level, at no more than 10% to 15% per week. Once you've reached your desired weekly mileage, the process of maintaining it is what I call "base training."

If your goal is to complete a long, single-day tour or a two-day self-contained tour in reasonable comfort (as opposed to doing so quickly), you can manage quite well if your weekly mileage is at least 125% of the distance of the ride or weekend tour.

In other words, 125 miles a week of training will support a single-day, 100-mile ride or a two-day self-contained tour of 100 miles.

But just racking up the mileage isn't enough. You can accumulate 105 miles a week by doing 15 miles every day, but that won't prepare you as well for a 70-mile trip as doing less mileage but getting in an occasional ride of at least 40 miles. You need to train for endurance and long periods of time in the saddle.

The chart below shows training schedules for weekly mileages of 50, 75, 100, 125 and 150.

Base Training Schedule
	Day
Weekly Mileage	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
50	10	rest	10	5	rest	25	rest
75	18	rest	10	7	rest	35	5
100	24	rest	8 (I)	10	rest	50	8
125	23	10	10 (I)	12	rest	60	10
150	20	10 (I)	15	15 (P)	rest	75	15
(I) = Interval Training (optional) entails repeated short sprints of up to 2 to 4 minutes. Find a way to make it fun by charging hills, dashing to stoplights, or impulsively deciding to go as hard as you can for a mile. The speed part of these workouts should be about 10 to 15 minutes.
(P) = Pace Training (optional) workouts are longer, not at a sprint, but faster than your normal touring speed. The purpose is increasing the speed you can maintain over distances of 5 to 10 miles. If you don't want speed workouts, there's no obligation. Take the speed days as easy ones and do the mileage at your normal pace.