Hi guys. A local club have just hinted today that they will be announcing details of their local mountain bike race. It’s about 35 miles and about 4000ft vert. I’ve recently started to train consistently again. Did a few weeks of trad base / high end zone 2 and the fitness started to kick in pretty good. Heart rate significantly dropped for the watts and all that.
I predict that the race / event will be in about 6 weeks. I want to do as well as I can and push it.
My Trainerroad calendar was loaded with another 4 weeks of base followed by a build.
Should I jump straight into the mountain bike marathon plan and follow it until the race? My Endurance isn’t much of an issue. I commute anyway 3 days a week at 90 mins a time so I’m getting the easier stuff in that way.
I’ve always had great ftp gains in ss base (2) so I’d go for more sweet spot base and then a couple of weeks of cherry picking workouts from speciality phase just to get used to the intensity closer to the event.
I’d play with PlanBuilder and see what it suggests, but if it’s too different from what Jonas suggested I’d go with that instead.
And personally I loose MTB skills really fast - if I’d only been road commuting for the last few months then I’d definitely need to be getting out on the MTB on the kind of terrain that you’ll be racing on for some emergency revision!
How are your MTB skills and how technical is the course? If an easy course for you then just focus on fitness. If it’s a hard course for you technically then just forget the fitness and ride your MTB as much as possible to get more comfortable on the trails. When I first started riding MTB, I would get killed on the trails by guys that I could drop on the road easily.
Yeah, that’s been kinda on what I’ve been thinking, I’ve just started the plan before the club sprung this event on me. Rather than go to ss base, I’m moving onto trad base 2 as it’s got SS and some tempo. Then onto the sustained build and it’s a good mix of punchy longer vo2 and threshold work which I think will suit and give me what I need. Then regardless follow on with the xc plan as I will more than likely have something else to race nearer the summer