How best to incorporate hill rides into IM plans?
My two upcoming IMs are hilly. All of my training on the trainer is...um...not hilly. With the HIM / IM plans I'm wondering how folks fit in hill workouts (or are they even necessary?).
There's a 21 mile loop of major hills near my home. Would it screw with the plans to do this hill ride instead of the Sunday ride in the plan? Only problem I see is that it's the day after the long bike ride. I'd prefer to ride this route on the weekend because the road is seriously dangerous on weekdays.
Should I incorporate this ride...or just skip hill workouts altogether?
Thanks for your input!
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Just a nooB but riding hills can be so much fun that it would be a shame to NOT ride them. I know that Coach R loves riding hills. As a fellow socal person, I love riding the hills all year - including the Palos Verdes loop just south/west of Hawthorne. It was one of the rides I did last year as part of training for the Oceanside 70.3. I am now in the Nov OS and am doing the Outdoor Bike hack which means riding a little bit longer since I am not on the trainer. I've been managing to get in the work while still doing the hills. I certainly hope there is a way to incorporate hill riding into the IM and HIM plans.
I remember reading in the wiki somewhere that it is certainly possible to do all your training on the flat and still be ready for the hills because watts are watts. Still, I know that most folks I talk to find that it is easier generating power while climbing. With enough gears, you can flatten out any hill while maintaining the appropriate power. I am sure more experienced folks will chime in.
Rubin
The hills are pretty short & rolling, and there is one crazy steep hill for about 3/4 mile so I'm not sure if the hills would be long enough for intervals. Good idea though! I just almost exclusively ride on flat terrain and after previewing both courses, I think I may be in for a rude awakening if I don't incorporate some hill workouts.
It just looks like the Sunday rides are sorta recovery rides and don't know if swapping those for a 90 minute hill ride would be the smart thing to do.
@Rubin - thanks for your insight. That's the exact route (PV Loop) that I ride. The profile is almost identical to the hills in the Louisville IM I'm doing later this year. Oceanside 70.3 is my next race and I thought it was flat until I took a look at the elevation chart!
Mac - first, my personal experience, then some EN theory:
I've done flat courses, I've done hilly courses (Oceanside as a full IM, then as 1/2 about 3 times), and the last 3-4 years, I've done a "hilly" IM (CDA) in June and a "flat" IM (AZ) in Nov. From my house, if I go north, I get a hilly route (say, 5-6000 vertical feet/100 miles, like CDA), and if I go south, I get a flatter route (a little less than 3000'). For my longer rides, it seemed I would do the flatter route early in the year and the hillier one later in the year, so my training routes were the opposite of the race I had coming up. It never seemed to have any impact on my performance in the races. Why not?
EN theory: power is a great leveler. Going @ 170 watts up a 9% grade for 5 minutes is the same as going @ 170 watts for 5 minutes on a flat road. That's the way RnP have us train, that's the way they have us race. Ignore the grade, the wind, the crowd, just ride at the prescribed pace, and the results will come.
Conclusion: You can really use whatever terrain you want to train on. You're not training to ride "hills" or "flats"; you're training to ride at a specific, steady effort level for an anticipated length of time, whatver the grade, up or down. Getting out and riding hills WILL help you learn how to hold that steady effort down in the aero bars while going uphill, which is very useful out on the back side of that Camp Pendleton course. And, learning how to get up to that HIM or IM effort level while going DOWNHILL is a useful skill, if you're trying to get thru the 56 or 112 miles as fast as you SHOULD. And varying training routes helps break up the boredom of training.
The Saturday rides (and Sunday one once you get in that phase) are better to do on the road than the Tuesday trainer rides.
Great advice from Al here. Trust me, read and reread anything Al ever posts.
And can you clarify what you mean by the Sunday rides being "recovery"? Do you mean the Sunday rides in the HIM/IM training plans? They are anything but "recovery", they are "work" rides. 80-85% is no joke.
@Al - Just got my powertap this weekend and am about halfway thru the Hunter Allen book. Good to know about hills/flats being essentially equal with power. Thanks for the advice. I definitely need to do some hill work though, mainly to work on my descending skills. Super unstable once I get well above 25 mph or so, even with my knees on the top tube.
@Dave - the two main races are IM Louisville and the back half of Oceanside 70.3. The bike leg is my limiter and even moreso hill riding (although I run very easily uphill, go figure). Not sure how hilly they compare to other races, if at all, but their elevation profiles were enough for me to notice!
@Tucker - The Sunday HIM bike rides looked much less taxing than the long Saturday rides and I didn't know if swapping in a hill ride on Sunday was counterproductive to the HIM plan. It sounds like the Sunday workout is equally challenging so perhaps that is indeed to spot to put the hard hill workouts.
Thanks for everyone's advice!
Mac,
Oceanside isn't "that" hilly. There are three hills on the backside a short section of generally up hill rollers. There's a fast section of generally downhill rollers for about the last third of the backside.
Louisville isn't that bad either, nothing to really worry about.
You need to ride north to the San Gabriels and do the long climbs up here. Once you ride 20+ miles continuously at 5-8% it kinda puts everything else into perspective. You won't never be skeered of anything again
I come to California every year to visit family in Simi Valley (I'll be there in June) and I ride between there and PCH in the canyons. There is nothing like those canyons (Decker, Yerba Buena, Encinal, Piuma, etc) at IM Louisville. In fact, I doubt there is a climb that long in the whole state of KY!
The longest continuous climb at IM Louisville is just before the turnaround on the out and back and it's around 5 minutes of climbing, turn around, descend, 5 more minutes of climbing. I got around 4000 total feet for the Louisville course so it's not too bad, although it is constantly rolling.