Advice for a training plan with only 1 day a week to train...sort of

Training
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1

Hello There,

Some background:
I train to race cyclocross, which is my main focus, during the summer i will do MTB marathons (maybe 1 a month) and the occasional criterium.

For my cycling club i am a trainer for Cyclocross, MTB and road. This means that pretty much all year round, Tuesday and Thursday i will be at the club course to train youth and adults in one of the disciplines.
CX: september - Januari
MTB: February - may
Road: april - september

So my weekly schedule looks like this:
Monday: restday

Tuesday: leave the house at 17:00 to ride to the club (30 min), set up the course, train youth from 18:00-19:00, then train adults from 19:00-20:00. clean up, and ride home (30 min). During the CX/ MTBtraining i will be active and ride along a bit, but as far as intensity goes, its mostly endurance, with a few sprint efforts etc. Its good for skills, but “not really training” for me? During road season, after the youth training we have a club training criterium which i will attend.

Wednesday: i can do a 60 minute training ride

Thursday: leave the house at 17:00 to ride to the club (30 min), set up the course, train youth from 18:00-19:00, then train adults from 19:00-20:00. clean up, and ride home (30 min). During the training i will be acctive and ride along a bit, but as far as intensity goes, its mostly endurance, with a few sprint efforts etc. Its good for skills, but “not really training” for me?

Friday: rest day

Saturday: 30-60 minute “easy” run.

Sunday: 3+ hour endurance ride or club ride or race

My thought: use the wednesday ride to do a sweetspot/ threshold / VO2 workout
I am not going to do workouts at 5:30 anymore, it destroys me with my current life and is not productive. Yes, i can manage it for a while and i do get gains, but my mood and enthusiasm to do a clubride is very diminished. Before i did low volume plans before, with succes.

Any advice?
Wait for Adaptive Training to go live?
Wait for the Train Now feature to go live?

2

It’s already live. Using this feature may be the best option for you.

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3

Thoughts:

  1. Do you need 2 rest days and an easy day on Saturday given that you’ve already described Tuesdays and Thursdays as “not really training”? That’s 5 days of the week when you’re not really progressing your fitness. If you really can’t/don’t want to do any more on Mon/Fri/Sat then can you get a bit more out of Tuesdays and Thursdays? E.g. fit a 20 minute SS interval into your ride to and/or from the club?
  2. If Sundays are 3+ hour endurance rides and Tues/Thu is mostly endurance, I’d be inclined to use Wednesday for VO2. Especially if you’re planning to race some crits and need that high end power and repeatability.
  3. Don’t think Adaptive Training or TrainNow is going to be much help until they add in the ability for it to analyse unstructured rides (at the moment it only analyses rides linked to TR workouts). Assuming you have power for all your rides of course. No timeframe for when they’ll add that in. So at the moment your TrainNow recommendations would only be based on whatever TR workouts you’ve done recently which I’m guess isn’t many.
4

I use the Android App, is it available there already?

5

  1. “not really training” is relative i guess, i am on the bike for 4 hours, so at the least it is endurance money in the bank. And although the intensity isn’t that high, it is still quite taxing, it includes doing the warm ups, core work, etc… it still amounts to about 140 TSS in total for the Tuesday and for the Thursday. I can indeed use part of the “to and from” ride for some more intensity, which i sometimes already do.

  2. VO2 was what i was thinking about too. The sunday rides, when clubrides resume, i can choose the intensity based on the group i ride with. Or when i go for the MTB clubride, it can also be made more intense.

  3. OK

6

all your answers regarding train now are here:

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7

You must be using the Beta version of the Android app right now, if you want access to TrainNow.

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8

Thats what i thought, i can pick workouts manually for now, which is fine. Currently on a “rest” week, which means i’ll only skip the wednesday evening workout and maybe do a bit less on sunday… :grin:

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