My biggest ride for the year is coming up in 10 days - 75 miles with 10k ft of climbing. What “form” value should I be shooting for in order to be optimally fresh for this event while avoiding too much detraining?
If your form is normally yellow during a regular training week, I would suggest to have a blue form for the competition day.
Hey David,
This is a great question & roughly relates to tapering for an event.
From a theoretical perspective, the idea would be that you want to avoid your form going yellow (or red) during the event. The way that you do this is by tapering, which allows your form to go up and create a bit of a ‘buffer’ to help prevent you from fatiguing too quickly during the event.
For the exact answer to your question, the easy answer for me would be that it depends… on a couple of main factors: what’s your current training load, what’s the estimated Focus/XSS for the event (think about the relationship between your current TL and the estimated XSS of the activity). For 75 miles and 10k ft climbing, I’d say that you’re likely looking in the range of 325-425 XSS (depending on how aggressive the ride is).