The Official Training for Mountain on the Road Thread

[S54MCoupe]

This is my friend Lyle:

He rides XC for the Subaru/Gary Fisher regional team and he'll have plenty of helpful advice for those of you who are looking to train on the road.

Hi, I guess the question is how much time to train on the road for xc mountain bike racing (?).

If that's correct then I'd say the answer (my opinion) is going to depend on how much time you train overall.
If, for instance, you are an Expert MTB racer and you train 5-6 days a week, I'd recommend spending 2-3 days a week doing a 4-5 hour road bike ride (even if you are riding the road on your mountain bike)... IF YOU ENJOY IT!!! You could also experiment with some competitive group rides... you might like it and if you're a MTB racer you will have some strengths that a lot of roadies are missing.
I think the advantage of training on the road is that you can do LONG rides at low intensity. Most people who ride both Mountain and Road would agree that a 5 hour road ride is a lot easier than a 5 hour MTB ride.
There are a some MTB racers who don't train on the road but I'd say the majority of the top racers do both.
The important thing is to keep it fun (no brainer)... for some people this means variety, for others strictly MTB is where it's at.
Where I live most of our mountains (paved or otherwise) are steep and tall, so the mountain biking tends to be long climbs and long descents.
I like to do road biking because I can do longer endurance rides in the off season where I keep the effort relatively constant for 4+ hours. If I had to do a 4+ hour steep mountain bike climb I would typically expect a long descent to follow and I would probably be pretty tired afterwards and not want to do it again the next day.
If you are used to using heart rate "zones" or power then I'd say to ride at an Endurance and Tempo pace. That would mean that it wouldn't seem very hard for the first hour but by hour 4 or 5 you'd be pretty tired.
If you did that a few days a week on the road and and did mountain for a few days a week over the winter you'd be pretty strong when the next season rolled around. Make sure (maybe on your mountain days?) that you also include some pretty hard (threshold) efforts too... maybe a 20 min. climb as fast as you can on your mountain days and definitely take at least 1 day off.
I'd also say to break down your training into 4 week blocks, where you could do three weeks about like I described above and then take a week where you just ride whenever you feel like it and have fun, take it easy, etc.
Anyway, that's sort of a pretty loose answer but it's a start and if anyone has specific questions I'd be happy to answer to the best of my knowledge.

[BFloFoxRider.]

So is this guy going to "donate" some roads biukes for us to train on? hahahhaaha

[S54MCoupe]

Originally Posted by BFloFoxRider.

So is this guy going to "donate" some roads biukes for us to train on? hahahhaaha

Come to a Cross race, we've got demo bikes for you to race on. It's close to a road bike.