How many Miles a day is reasonable..

wrote:
: "Could you get a commitment from your kids to ride 50 or more
: miles a week outside of scouting events"
:
: That is the problem... almost all the kids play team sports... and
: have a number of other comittments to other activities.. so I can't
: see them getting the time to put in a proper training regimine.. so
: I have pretty much abandoned the bike idea.. and am looking around
: for something else that would work..

So, what you originally thought about won't work, so now, no bike trip
whatsoever, no matter how few miles, in how little days, will work.

Right.

In article ,
Kevan Smith writes:

What would be a decent working number to start with in regards to how
many miles a day they could cover.. for planning purposes.


This is a horrible idea! You'll lose all your kids before you get even
halfway.

I think he's already shined the idea on.

Anyways it's good to hear yer ever-livin' self again, stranger :-)


cheers,
Tom

--
-- Nothing is safe from me.
Above address is just a spam midden.
I'm really at: tkeats [curlicue] vcn [point] bc [point] ca

jj wrote:

On Fri, 07 Oct 2005 08:05:35 -0400, DrLith
wrote:

jj wrote:

On Thu, 06 Oct 2005 21:17:22 -0400, DrLith
wrote:

Most of the time my speedometer reads 20-23mph....

Well, as the Dixie Chicks would say, "There's your trouble."

Yet I bet you'd like to ride that speed for 30 minutes.

And there you would be wrong, because my goal in riding is to go places,
not to be fast.

So you're saying that if you could magically have the ability to go 20mph
on a bike safely, you would not, and you'd ride at 10mph? Strange.

[...you can't ride fast if you only ride slowly...]
[...Dr. Lith points out that she was countering the claim that only genetic
freaks and highly-trained people can ride for 6-8 hours at a time,
just slow down and toodle...]

Not exactly, I was implying that being able to be in the saddle and do
touring, expecting to get in shape the first week of the cross-country
tour, doing RAGBRAI with virtually no training, riding the Blue Ridge
without a biker's typical thin build might be due to some sort of genetic
ability to adapt. I'd say unless you have the ability to generate 300 watts
for hours at a time, you'd find it nearly impossible to ride the Blue Ridge
Parkway even at 8mph.

IMHO, you're exaggerating the demands of the BRP. I recently rode a
challenging century in West Virginia, and according to
http://www.kreuzotter.de/english/espeed.htm , I was putting down an
average of 200 Watts on the big climbs. That was good for about 6.5 mph
up the 3-mile, 7% grade on the Highlands Scenic Highway, and about
7.5mph on the 6-mile, 5.4% grade up to Show Shoe Village (the latter
featured 20mph wind gusts in my face on the way up, and a few pitches at
12% just to make it interesting).

That level of output was a sufferfest for me. 300 Watts would have
been good for a few more mph. Had I been capable of 300 Watts, a 200
Watt output would have been comfortable.

I was using 30x25 to spin in the saddle, and when I needed a change, I
stood on 30x17 or 30x19, as the pitch and my level of fatigue dictated.
There's no shame in stepping down from the big ring. :-)

Others -can- ride long distances, but it takes exceptional training and
preparation. In fact I'd say there are some riders on the other end of the
spectrum who are not 'born cyclists', but who love to ride, who find it
difficult to go for long periods in the saddle, difficult to ride hills.
Perhaps an example would be those with shorter femurs, and a sprinter's
makeup. Maybe part of it is mental makeup. I would find it torture to sit
on a bike and ride 10mph on the flat for 8 hours on a weekly basis.

So why not just dial the intensity back a notch or two and just go for
longer rides in the hills? When I was getting ready for the above
century, I went out for five and six hour rides in the hills near my
home, averaging slightly under 15mph. Given that I was racking up 6000
and 7000 feet of climbing per ride, I felt no shame in slowing down, or
in using the granny ring.

I *can* jam 23mph on the flats for quite awhile, but we don't have many
flat roads around here (Pittsburgh area) either, so I just adapt. I can
dial the difficulty from medium hilly to "Oh my God my quads are on
fire," and the average speed of the ride varies accordingly. If I want
to be out for a long time (which has its benefits in making you
stronger, both physically and mentally), I deliberately dial the
intensity back a notch. If I want to work on speed, then I go for a
shorter ride.

I always take at least one easy day between hard days. Injuries suck,
and they'll set you back far more than any worry about "not working hard
enough." So will working so hard that you catch cold. On top of all of
that, your body gets the benefits of training on the easy days, when it
is recovering, not on the hard days, when you are tearing it down. If
you never give it time to recover, you will never get the benefit of the
hard work you are doing. Ironically, getting fitter faster requires a
certain amount of rest.

The classic method of training for any endurance sport is to lay down a
big aerobic base. That means lots of exercise at easy to moderate
intensity, for about two months at the beginning of the season. Then
and only then do you stick in workouts to improve your lactate
threshold, your sprinting speed, etc. It sounds like you never laid the
base.

I want to ride a respectable
speed and that, to me, means averaging around 15-17mph over two hours,
minimum.

Respectable to whom?

Would the world end if you slowed to 13-14mph so that you could ride
for three or four hours, once or twice a week?

I have absolutely no interest in riding 10mph on the flats on a daily basis
for any reason, though I suspect my first century will be in the 13mph
range, even on the flats.

If you take the time to *slow* *down* a little bit, and put in some
long rides in preparation, I suspect that, given the level at which you
are already riding, you'll be able to do a good deal better than that,
depending upon how hard the century is. If you pick something like
Mountains of Misery or Cheat Mountain, it's going to be slow, but it
won't be anything to be ashamed of! :-)

Riding far, fast, takes both components: riding far, and riding fast.
When you train, you don't do both at the same time--it's too hard on
your body. You separate the two. You ride far to get your body used to
riding far. You ride fast to get your body used to riding fast. You do
some lactate threshold intervals to get your body used to riding hard
while still being aerobic, and to raise the level of output at which you
can still be aerobic. You put it all together on race day.

As a consequence of all of this, your average pace on your long rides
will naturally rise, without any deliberate effort on your part to try
to hammer it. Your own ability increases, so what feels easy to you
ends up increasing, too.

--
Chris BeHanna
'03 Specialized Allez Elite 27
'04 Specialized Hardrock Pro Disc

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