Today’s question is about increasing mileage and adjusting your on-bike fueling to match the new distance…

Hi Levi,

Thank you for your email, I am finding your site interesting and informative. Perhaps you can give me some advice?. I am 63 and ride 30-40 miles four times a week, then swim on a couple of the other days. What I would like to do is a 60 Mile trip. How do I go about adding the additional mileage?. I eat bananas, jelly babies (do you have these in the U.S.?) and M&M’s as on the road top up fuel, are these OK?

thanks for your help.
J.B.

Hi J.B.,

Thanks for reading! It sounds like you’re in good shape and putting in some good mileage each week! Based on the email, I don’t think you’ll have too much difficulty adding the mileage.

Here’s how I would do it…

First, let’s say you ride 150 miles per week on average. I would keep that about the same. Rather than add total mileage, we’re going to allocate your current mileage a little differently.

I would take three of your rides and limit them to 20-30 miles. Then your fourth weekly ride can be longer. You might even bump your long ride up to 50 miles one week and 60 miles the next. Or you could take gradual steps and go to 45, then 50, then 55, and then 60. Depends how comfortable you feel each week.

Since your weekly training volume will stay the same, the overall impact on your training lifestyle should be minimal.

As for ride fuel, it’s sort of a personal thing. If bananas, jelly babies, and M&M’s are working for you on 40 mile rides, they could probably work for you on a 60 mile ride. The problem is that those foods are mainly simple sugars, especially if you go heavy on the candy. Your body might get sick of that over the course of 60 miles. You might feel better and have more consistent energy levels over the course of the ride if you add in some complex carbohydrate sources, which could be as simple as some sort of energy bar or a granola bar full of oats.

Good luck!

[For everyone else in the US that isn't quite sure what jelly babies are... I think of them as a cross between jelly beans and Sour Patch Kids. They are like a semi-soft jelly bean and they're shaped like babies or little kids.]

I get these questions all the time, so it’s time to answer them all:

“I ride X miles, X times per week. I’m doing a big X mile ride in X weeks. Will I be alright?”

The answer is always the same: It depends.

You might see quite a few “10 weeks to the perfect century” plans in the pages of bicycling magazines, but that’s really just giving you a starting point. Unfortunately, there’s no set formula that works for everyone, all the time.

Let’s say you go out and do a 50 mile ride every weekend and feel pretty good afterward. You might be able to finish a century (100 mile ride.)

On the other hand, if you can complete 50 or 60 miles, but you fall over gasping when you finish, you might not be ready for a century.

(The general rule of thumb is to be able to do a training ride 75% of the event distance. So if you can do a 75 mile ride two weeks before your planned century, you’re doing alright. Just taper off and rest up for the century!)

Scaling back, let’s say you’re doing a few 10-12 mile rides each week. It’s entirely possible you can do a 25-40 mile ride next weekend.

But then again, you might not get past 15 miles before cramping up and calling it a day. I just can’t give you a better answer without knowing your entire riding history (i.e. analyzing all your training journals and riding with you in person.)

Continuing that thought, no one knows your body better than you do. If you feel like you are ready for a big ride, you probably are. If you feel weak while riding and are scared at the prospect of a slightly longer ride, you might want to take some more time to build up your fitness.

The only way to know if you’re ready is to do it and see how it goes!

Things to keep in mind:

Here are a few things to keep in mind when comparing your current training rides with your prospective century or bigger ride:

Terrain. 60 mile rides in Florida aren’t the best way to prepare for a 100 miler in Vermont.

Altitude. Along the same lines, a 60 mile ride at sea level is way different than something in Colorado at high elevation.

Speed and pace. Remember to pace yourself. If you enter a race or something where the distance is a little long, don’t start too fast, even if everyone else does.

A good rule of thumb is to do the first half of the ride at a slightly easier pace than you can handle. That way, you have energy saved for the second half. And if you have enough energy, you can ride the second half faster and get a good finishing time.

Fueling. Remember that if you’ll be riding longer than usual, you will probably take in more food and water than usual. And you want to space that out, so don’t wait until after 60 miles to start fueling.

(See my before and after, and during ride fueling articles for more info.)

Follow those tips and listen to your body and you’ll know whether you can take on that big ride!

Beginners tend to think of training in terms of miles. It’s just the “go to” unit of measurement in most endurance sports, especially running and cycling.

But it’s time to break the habit! You need to think in terms of time spent training, and that will be measured in hours.*

Miles just don’t cut it. Here are a few of the things that mileage doesn’t take into account:

• Terrain (i.e. Climbing.)
• Intensity.
• Weather (cold, rain, wind, etc.)
• Time.
• Drafting (lack of wind resistance.)

Think about this. Riding 30 miles on the flat roads of Florida with a tailwind could be done in one hour of moderate intensity riding. Riding up Mt Lemmon, a 30 mile climb in Arizona, would yield 2-3 hours of high intensity riding.

Both would be considered a “30 mile ride,” but obviously they were different workouts. So measuring and comparing training plans in terms of mileage is useless.

Mileage concerns bring about other problems, too.

Many riders bump up their total mileage to try to sound productive, but end up adding in junk miles, leading to a decrease in effectiveness and productivity.

I see many “my mileage is bigger than yours” competitions, whereas I rarely see people saying things like “hey I trained more hours than you did.”

If anything, you get into better debates, such as “I just beat you, and I only train 6 hours per week, compared to your 16.”

So by thinking in terms of hours rather than miles, you skip the immature mileage contests and encourage yourself to train more effectively and efficiently.

“Hours” is not the be all, end all.

While using hours as a standard for measuring training volume is a good idea, it still doesn’t paint the whole picture. To really analyze your training, you must also remember intensity.

So while “hours” is better than “miles,” the best measurement is found in “hours of quality riding.” Quality is much more important than quantity.

Think about this: Two short interval workouts per week will have you in better racing shape than five long easy rides per week. Someone doing 80 miles per week could very well destroy someone doing 250 miles per week in the local crit.

___________________________________________________________
*For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume we’re comparing apples to apples – i.e., structured training in 2008 vs structured training in 2009, or two athletes with proper training plans and similar goals. For example, you could not compare the training of a criterium racer to that of a RAAM competitor and form any meaningful conclusion.

Training for endurance sports is tough, because you need to balance intensity and duration in your training plan. Too little duration, you won’t be able to complete longer races. Too much duration, and the extra recovery time means you can’t fit in as much intensity. With too little intensity, you’ll get dropped if the pack picks up temporarily.

With it being so hard to find the perfect balance, and intense training being rather uncomfortable, athletes err on the side of too much duration. This is especially true in cycling (relatively speaking, cyclists put in a lot more miles than runners, swimmers, etc.) As such, the term “junk miles” was born…

What Are “Junk Miles?”

• Junk miles: Miles added into your training plan with no purpose other than to increase your mileage count.

The time spent on junk miles is usually some moderate pace riding, typically too hard to serve as a recovery ride, but not hard enough to really spark increased fitness.

It might seem like a good idea, but you really don’t gain anything from junk miles. They do nothing but waste your energy.

Exceptions To The “Junk”

Before you get too worked up, don’t confuse junk miles with endurance training and long rides. If you have a purpose for a particular long ride, then the extra miles would not be considered “junk miles.”

Here are a few exceptions to the rule:

• Base training. Base training is a vital part of the periodized training plan where you do rather long rides on a consistent basis to condition your legs to the bike.
• The endurance ride. Even during intense training, it’s useful to do a long ride once every week or two to maintain the endurance your built during base training.
• Getting your butt ready. As well as building endurance, sometimes you need to put in some long rides to get your butt conditioned to sitting on a saddle.
• Fun. If you want to go out on a long joy ride, it’s perfectly acceptable to make “have fun” the purpose of your ride!

I should also point out mileage is relative. A cyclo-cross racer who competes in 60 minute races on weekends may have some junk miles in their program if they are doing six hour rides every day. On the other hand, a stage racer needs to get used to riding six hours a day for weeks on end, so they would have a purpose behind each of their six hour rides.

Why Junk Miles Are So Prevalent

Most riders naturally gravitate toward junk miles when they’re looking to improve fitness. Here’s why…

Doing recovery rides, which are very beneficial to all cyclists, are so slow and boring most people don’t have the willpower to relax and go easy. It just doesn’t feel beneficial because it’s so easy.

On the other hand, intense rides that boost your muscular endurance, lactate threshold, etc. are hard! So if you’re not dedicated, it’s easy to skip them and just go “kinda hard.”

These moderate paced rides that are “kinda hard” are the most common form of junk miles. These rides are hard enough to make you feel like you’re working, but easy enough that you don’t feel the urge to vomit. In other words, they’re comfortably painful.

Why You Should Avoid Junk Miles

Do junk miles still sound good to you? They wear you out, so you must be improving fitness, right?

Wrong. The allure of junk miles is like getting roped in by a snake oil salesman. They feel great at the time, but eventually you’ll look back and realize you got no benefit.

A typical junk mile ride is hard enough to make you feel like you’re working (so you’re getting worn out instead of recovered,) but easy enough that you don’t feel the urge to vomit (so you’re probably not working hard enough to improve any aspect of your fitness.)

Unfortunately, if you actually want to accomplish something and maybe win a bike race, you have to step out of your comfort zone!

To recover, you need easy rides that are truly easy.

To improve, your hard rides should truly be hard.

If you keep doing junk miles, you’ll just plateau (at best) or burn out from overtraining (at worst.)

Two Steps to Avoid Junk Miles

Here’s my two step plan to avoid junk miles:

1. Get dedicated. You have to want to improve, and be willing to sacrifice to reach your goals.
2. Structured training. Get a structured training plan and stick to it. Resist the urge to add in extra miles.

It’s that simple! (Simple in theory at least. Quite hard to be motivated and disciplined enough to put this into practice.)