So I commute to work (27 km is the minimum each way). I have been doing 3x / week but am hoping to do 5.
I also want to throw in some more weight lifting.
What is the fastest I can go and have minimal fatigue to allow me to ride more days and weight lift?
when I ride at 50% of my Threshold it’s sooooooo slow and for commuting that doesn’t work well. (I physically can’t even do a few hills at that slow). At LTP i’m pretty comfy but I think that would be really hard to do 10x a week for me right now and weight lift (and work).
so I think the answer lays somewhere below LTP. just not sure how much?
My main goal in bike riding is fitness, fun, mental de-stressing, challenge. I want to have a few hard days and grow faster but that’s not my top top priority.
I’m in a similar situation: 33km commute each way, 4-days in a row (used to be 5 days back in my prime, but it ruinned any chance of quality zwift racing on the weekend).
For me ~75% LTP seems like a comfortable target to hover around…which is mentally hard when fresh early in the week. But I know if I spend too much time close to 100% LTP (or any interval training) early in the week then I’ll be wrecked come day 4 and my commute time will blow out (not great for making family dinner on time!).
For traditional Z2 most will treat LTP as a ceiling if terrain and gearing allow that on your routes.
Or consider RPE at a comfortable conversational pace and don’t worry about monitoring watts.
Jarradk did you ever train during your commutes? that’s my plan. sort of what drove me to xert was using the app to do my own intervals rather than set stuff. I just will limit it to what I can recover from. I am hoping to add extra hours to a few days also to make it longer.
just much easier in my life right now to go the long way and ride 2 hours to work (instead of ~1)…rather than a 2 hour ride on a saturday.
would love any other tips or advice or just stories!!!
That happened to me when I had kids: goodbye weekend rides, hello commutes as main opportunity for cycling fitness. I later bought a smart trainer to open the 830-1030pm ride window on weekends and weeknights!
Anyway, Ive tried many commute training patterns in my time. The learnings boil down to a few principals in structuring my week, generally regardless of specific day patterns:
ideally a rest day before any interval day (or zwift race day)
I can only recover effectively from max 2 interval days / w.
I (mostly) need a full rest day, the day before a hard interval day.
The interval session must always be the morning
if trying to add some structure to the training then xert ebc works well with custom built workouts and smart intervals tailored to your planned commute routes/variations (e.g. go hard on hills, TT intervals on straight sections etc)
if only riding mon-friday then Monday was always hard intervals and Friday was long-commute or TT interval day, basically try wreck yourself leading into the weekend, and wreck yourself first ride back after the weekend. (That pattern obviously doesn’t work when I’m zwift racing on sat or Sun, so i set structure to above rules instead)
My current commute pattern is:
mon easy 2x
Tues hard morning, easy afternoon
Wed easy 2x
Thur easy 2x (maybe 1 longer commute if feeling fresh)
Friday off
Sat zwift race, breakthrough test or structured interval workout
Sun rest day, or easy erg ride depending on feels
Thought about this a lot as well before kids came up and I basically had unlimited cycling time and motivation.
In the end the logical thing to do is to choose an effort which makes you feel after the commute just about the same as before the commute. Else there would be little chance of delivering quality work + commuting back home + not falling in bed right away.
So thats RPE < 4 or something?
In my experience that is a lot lower than LTP but that might be individual or even depend on how well xert managed modeling you out.
And the answer to a too steepy commuting terrain might be a light and adjustable ebike, which can be ridden well in off-mode and which delivers power metric to Garmin (so no bosch nor shimano)