For Beginner Triathletes, Bike Hard and Bike Often!

Ed. Note: This is a guest post from 10-time Ironman, 2-time NothingMan (self-supported Ironman) Sheila Plemich.  You can keep up with her training exploits at http://crackheadfe.blogspot.com

I’m pretty sure someone told you that you need a bike. If you are going to do more than sprint triathlons, it should be a road bike—although a hybrid or MTB can get you through your first few sprints. If you have money to burn, go ahead and get that tricked out triathlon bike, but realize that “it’s not about the bike.”

It becomes pretty obvious that no matter what distance triathlon you choose to race, it’s important to be a good cyclist. There are several reasons:

• the stronger you are on the bike, the less painful it will be to run
• triathlons are heavily weighted towards time spent on the bike, so as long as you are going to be biking for most of the race, it makes sense to try and be good at it, right?
• biking is the part of a triathlon where you are going the fastest, and fast is fun, right?

So how do you get good at biking? Do you buy a bunch of lightweight parts for your bike or race wheels? No. Those things may improve your speed slightly, but once you have them and have used them for a bit, they won’t make you faster.

You get good at biking in two simple ways: bike a lot, and bike hard.

Obviously, if your race is going to include a 25-mile bike leg (an Olympic distance triathlon’s bike leg is 24.8 miles or 40K), then you want to be fit enough to ride 25 miles at a pretty good clip. Depending on how fast you ride, 25 miles might take you 1-1.5 hours. That’s not a long time. But you might want to actually ride further than that sometimes, so it makes the 25 miles seem easy (you’ve probably heard this concept applied to running and swimming, too!).

If you are very dedicated, you’d ride 25 miles maybe three or four times a week. Or, you might ride less than that, one to three times, and then ride longer (say, 40 miles) once a week. Three to four rides a week is usually plenty when it comes to building your bike fitness.

What about the hard part? Just as for swimming and running, you don’t always want to ride at the same pace. You need to have some sort of benchmark to measure what is easy vs. hard for you. Speed is not a good benchmark unless you live somewhere where it is flat, the same temperature and the same amount (or lack) of wind all the time, since hills, temperature and wind significantly impact speed.

Good benchmarks are heart rate and power—power being the gold standard. Most beginners don’t have power meters, so they use heart rate, or a combination of heart rate and perceived effort. Perceived effort is always a good measurement, since even if you do someday spring for the power meter, you will still want to stay in touch with your body’s overall sense of effort, especially at longer races like the half and full Ironmans.

Why do you need to ride hard sometimes? Because climbing hills requires more effort than flats, you might need to surge to pass someone (legally), and because when you ride hard, just like in running, you are working on raising your lactate threshold, meaning that if you do it often enough, you will be able to ride faster at a lower heart rate (or power output).

How often and for how long in each ride do you need to ride hard? When you are first starting out, you may only want or need to spend less than half of your total ride time going hard. You should always begin with a warm-up, and a good rule of thumb is 10-15 minutes for a short ride, 15-30 minutes for a ride of 1-2 hours, and 30-40 minutes for a ride of 2.5+ hours.

As you build up the amount of time you are able to ride hard, you will find it feels easier and easier or you are going faster and faster. This is where the heart rate monitor (or power meter) can really help you out by telling you precisely what you are doing. You should stay at a given level for a few weeks or prove your fitness at that level in a race before you try and go even harder.

What does hard really mean, though? “Very hard” would be as fast as you could go for 25 miles, as in a time trial. Hard would be not as hard as that, where it feels hard but you can maintain it for about 30-40 minutes easily. Below that you have basically moderate and easy, and when you warm up it should be easy building to moderate to prepare you for the hard stuff.

Just as for running and swimming, it can feel easier to push yourself in a group setting. Try and hook up with a local cycling club, which will probably have several levels of riders, or find some other folks you can ride with that are slightly faster than you. Ask around about where the killer hills are in your area. A good workout is to warm-up and then ride a hill or several hills in “repeats,” where you ride up very hard, and then take it easy going back down.

What do you do during the winter if you live in a place where outdoor riding would be dangerous or impossible? You purchase a bike trainer, which is a device where you attach your rear wheel to it and there is a resistance drum that the tire rubs against to simulate road conditions. There are many good trainers on the market, and if you can test ride one before you buy, that’s great, because depending on how strong you are, you might want a different type. If you ride indoors on a trainer, you will want a fan blowing on you because you will sweat a lot due to not creating your own wind.

There is discussion as to how time on the trainer equates to time on the road. Some people think that time on a trainer is “worth” more than time on the road. Forget about it. It is the same. Time is time! But it’s OK to spend less time during the winter months on the trainer than you would if you were riding outside, but make the time count by spending more time going hard than you normally would. You can watch TV, movies, footage of bike races, triathlons, whatever gets you going, and you can have your favorite music on.

You can also buy DVD’s called Spinervals that guide you through specific workouts. My philosophy is that if you put in a lot of hard time in the winter, then the transition to longer outdoor riding is easy. I build up to a 2.5-2.75 hour trainer ride, and once it warms up, I can easily ride 3-4 hours outdoors the very first time I go out. You don’t want to burn out mentally during the winter, so if you cut back your biking time, you can add more swimming or running, because winter is a good time to work on those skills.

It’s as simple as that—bike a lot, and bike hard!

Sheila looking quite aero!

Sheila embarked on triathlons in 2000, coming from a background of 10 years of strength training, two years of running, zero swimming and negligible biking. She completed her first Ironman (which in 1999 she said she would never do) in 2001 and has continued to do one or two a year, a few half Ironmans and sprints just to keep things entertaining. In the process, she has become a student of the sports and has adopted the triathlon lifestyle. You can find her on Facebook and on her blog at http://crackheadfe.blogspot.com.