When asked about his training, Eddy Merckx, the Belgian bicycle phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s, replied “I ride lots.” Training for a cross-country bicycle ride is very different from training for professional racing, but the same underlying philosophy applies: you need to ride lots.
How much? Well, I’ve ridden about 5,000 miles in the last six months. I started out just “riding a lot”, but about three months ago I tried to ride several days in a row that were similar to days planned for the ride and found I couldn’t sustain that pace. At that point, I started to follow the 10% rule: increase mileage by 10% a week. I determined how much I would have to ride in early February to get to a 450 mile pace (the mileage of the first week of the trip) by early May.
That was doable, and I followed that regime until the last week or so, when I felt comfortable I could handle what the trip would demand — and when there was too much to do to get ready for the trip to keep riding that much!
Most of my riding was around home in La Cañada and Pasadena, sometimes doing multiple trips around a 30+ mile circuit. A typical training ride when I was putting in about 65 miles a day looked like this:
Now and then, I was able to expand my horizons a bit. In late March, Toni and I took our RV for a shakedown trip to Faria Beach in Ventura County. The first day there, I rode up to Santa Barbara on a cool, gray day that included about 10 miles of a downpour. Riding in the rain is not fun, but I need to be prepared for rainy days on the trip, so I counted the ride a success. Here’s what the beach looked like before it started raining.
The next day I rode from Faria Beach to Santa Paula, and was graced with extraordinary weather and scenery
Ventura County beach
Ventura County near Ojai
Ojai Valley
Poppies
Lupine
The best training ride in terms of miles covered, feet climbed, and riding conditions, was a trip from home to Glendora Mountain Road, a quiet road into the Angeles National Forest, which was even quieter the day I rode it last week because it was closed to traffic. Here’s that route. You can get a bird’s eye view of the ride by clicking below:
It was a beautiful late spring day, with just a little snow left on Mount Baldy as shown in this picture taken at the top of the hill.
By the end of that ride, which was 80 miles long and included over 7,000 feet of riding (more combined mileage and climbing than any day of the trip), I felt ready to tackle the ride. We’ll soon see if I am really ready!