The Triathlon Bike Workout

"Thinking about bike workouts as you progress from the easiest to the hardest, one real basic workout, I do them on Mondays and Fridays, is an easy ride. And on the bike you always want to maintain between 80 and 100 rpms. Many tri-athletes make the error of trying to push too big of a gear. So on those easy days you can think about technique, think about not rocking your hips in the saddle, think about having a smooth pedal stroke and pedal in circles, just smooth efficient circles. So that's your basic starting point for training are those easy days. Moving on in intensity, we have what we call extensive endurance, where you do a lot of extensive endurance in the base period. They're longer rides, they're not real difficult. Your heart rate is on the lower end of the aerobic spectrum, 65-70% of max, and you work for an extended period of time. As you get closer to the race period, those become more intensive endurance where the overall duration is probably shorter, but you'll work at a little bit higher level. During the pre-competitive period, a real valuable bike workout is to do what we call cruise intervals. That's something that you can do on your triathlon bike, and that can help get you into the aero position. Some of the long rides, especially in the base period, can be done on a road bike, or with groups. But as you get into the pre-competitive period, the cruise intervals, basically what you're doing is a lactate threshold interval. So you're getting at a 40K time trial pace and holding it for say, ten minute blocks with short blocks of recovery. As you move in deeper into the pre-competitive period, or even into the race season, you can do more intensive speed work intervals such as three-by-threes, three repeats of three minutes, typically with equal amounts of rest. Or five-by-fives and you can progress from that smaller block to the bigger block. Actually the opportunity to interview George Hincapie, who is the only rider that was on all seven of Lance Armstrong's Tour De France winning teams, and asked him about the biggest bang for the buck workouts, and he said hill repeats. I mean, when you're pressed for time, do your warm up and go up and do hill repeats. And he even said if he contrasted the training he did for the classics with the tour, the only difference was the length of the climbs. When you're doing the one day races you do lots of short steep power climbs, and for the extended races, you do longer more gradual seated kind of climbing. The same could be said for triathlon. So tailor those efforts that you do in those intervals to the kind of racing you're doing to do to the kind of train you're going to do. If you're doing a longer or a half iron man race, such as iron man in Canada or Pacific Crest that has some longer grades, do some extended climbing intervals. But great bang for the buck workout, climbing intervals."