I’m currently on a MV polarised plan doing 6-10hrs a week.
In six weeks, I’m heading off to Mallorca for a month for the sole purpose of taking a break from life and cycling.
With the weather, amazing roads and no other plans to interfere with cycling I suspect I’ll be riding a lot more than I usually do but I want to make that as successful as possible, so should I consider making time to be ramping up volume a bit before I go and if so, how should I go about it?
Depends on how well you can recover. I usually go on vacations long, not intense i.e. can push ramp rate really high in short term. A la 3 week vacation from at that time usual ~12h to 18h → 21h → 27h and then on return, again recovery week with 7h.
It depends on what you normally do and what you want to do. Will you be doing long days? Multiple in a row? Do you ever do long rides or multiple long rides now? Will you be doing a lot of climbing? Do you do that today? Do you need to think about gearing? Are you used to the temps that you’ll be in? Do you have your fueling and recovery strategies down or need to work on those?
Whenever I go on cycling vacations, I bring along hiking shoes and mix in hikes to keep moving, but give the cycling a rest, so that I don’t waste a whole day on the couch (unless I need a couch day!)
Seriously though I’m off for 3.5 weeks to France in the Campervan with my wife (we’re retired). 4 weeks after we get back I’m cycling in the mountains behind Altea & Calpi with some friends. On the holiday I’ll cycle every other day but only for 1-2 hrs relatively easy spinning, just enjoying it. May do some of the signature climbs if we are close to them. As I don’t race I don’t really have a top end to loose but I want to keep as much of up my aerobic fitness as I can for the Spanish trip. I’d say just ride for enjoyment and don’t get too tired in the process. Problem with holidays is that alcohol really screws up recovery if you drink.
There’s a ‘commas are important’ joke in here somewhere
I’d suspect that preparing for the specific demands of the area and the kind of rides you have planned would probably pay bigger dividends than increasing total volume at this point- whether that’s long days in the saddle, big climbs, backing up bigger days etc. The latter may come about as a result of the former, but I think 6 weeks would probably be too short to see much in the way of fitness gains from higher volume- those tend to occur over the long term IME. (I’d probably want to start something like that feeling relatively fresh/recovered, too.)
It actually sounds like you’re pretty well-prepared given your previous experience, and if you’re just riding for fun there’s a lot of room to adjust things on the day depending on how you feel- I’d just enjoy the holiday, sounds like a pretty great one!
If you ar going to be there for a month for the primary purpose of riding, I would just use the time there to ramp up the volume. Do slightly more than your normal week the first week (maybe 8-12 hours vs 6-10) and add volume in each week, depending on how you feel.