RAGBRAI TRAINING TIPS

Mar 12

Saddle time! Saddle time is the most important part to keep in mind as you train for a week-long ride like RAGBRAI. You’ll be spending 4-8 hours a day on your bike for 7 days. You’re going to want to feel ready to handle that so you don’t develop saddle sores during the week! Even being a daily commuter will give you an advantage because you’re spending time in your saddle.

Miles! You’ll want to make sure you’re getting enough miles in before the last week of July. David Ertl, a USA Cycling certified coach, recommends riding 1,000 miles before RAGBRAI.

Strength! I’m a big proponent of making sure I feel strong riding 30-40 miles 1-2x per week for the two months leading up to RAGBRAI. I’ll do one bigger ride (60-75 miles) 2-3 weeks out. This year, with all the hills, I will certainly be adding more strength training along with more elevation.

Powered by Plants Cycling reached out to VC Adventure Time (formerly The Vegan Cyclist – Tyler Pierce) for some training tips:

“The main thing for if you're about to go into a week-long ride, the way that I do it for impossible routes, is I try to come in honestly underfit and with the lowest fatigue that I can, because you will work into it.
If you're going to ride seven days, you don't want to come in super, super fit with all the best fitness and high fatigue, because then by day four or five, you're crushed. So you can actually train into it, and then day four, five, six actually is getting way better for you. With that being said, you want to be able to have the base level fitness. So what I do is I put in a big block leading into a week, so I'll explain about that.
WEEK 1: I'm going to do a three-week block where week one is probably bigger duration, lower intensity, so I'm trying to do really big rides, maybe looking at like 15 to 20 hours of riding in the week.
WEEK 2: I will drop that duration down a little bit and start adding intensity. So like maybe a Zwift race or maybe some intervals or like maybe I'll go for a KOM, but either way I go from like say 20 hours a week and I'll drop that down to 15 hours a week, but the intensity is higher. I'm trying to bump my FTP as much as possible.
WEEK 3: I might only do 10 hours, but my intensity is way up. I might do two Zwift races, maybe two blocks of intervals, really trying to just ramp it up.
WEEK 4: Then that fourth week, I'm just cruising around maybe 10 hours a week, but no intensity.
RECAP: Week one, duration high, intensity low, and then as I drop the duration, I'm increasing the intensity until the week before the event. Then you don't want to just stop riding. A lot of people, a lot of new riders, they're like, ‘Well, I want to be really fresh.’ So then they don't ride days before this trip and that's not the idea. So you want to try to maintain your fitness while not increasing fatigue. So the week before, maybe one day that's kind of spicy, but other than that, maybe like an hour, hour and a half where you're just riding around, just keeping the legs moving. You want to ride all the way into that week, but your intensity is really low, your duration is pretty low. So then you should come in after the three week block with a high fitness, low fatigue. But if you're under fit, that's fine because you'll work into it throughout the week.”