Welcome to the Foundations Long Event training plan. The training plan is designed to help you prepare for your Grand Fondo or similar long event, with a gradual progression of training over a twelve week period. This plan includes 3 assessments to track training progress.
The program makes some baseline assumptions about the athlete:
- The rider want to improve their ability in Fondo riding or races that are about 70-120 miles or 3-8 hours in duration.
- The rider has a good baseline of aerobic fitness and has been consistently riding for 2-3 months.
- The rider has around 7-9 hours per week for dedicated training.
- The rider is in good health and is injury free.
- The rider has a good understanding of the requirements of rest and recovery before and after hard training sessions [including nutrition].
- The rider has a typical weekly schedule with more work M-F and less or no work on weekends.
Some notes:
1. If you have less than 7-9 hours/ week for this program, you can simply trim the warm up and cool down efforts to fit your time allowance and do your best to prioritize the efforts for any given day of riding. The minimum time to complete the efforts with reasonable warm up and cool down is around 5 hrs/ week.
2. If you have more than 7-9 hours/ week for this program, add volume as appropriate after you complete the efforts for a given ride, generally at Aerobic Endurance pace.
3. If your schedule does not conform to the standard work week of M-F, you can apply the program to whatever fits your schedule by starting it on the correct day. When you choose to apply the program, select the first day to be whatever day is your "Monday". For example, if you have Sundays and Mondays off from work, you might make Tuesday the first day of the program. This will make everything line up.
What to expect: hard training with a 3 weeks of building work follow by a short active recovery period of 3-4 days. The intense sessions are focused on steady state efforts [with some "over/unders"].
If you train using power as a guide for intensity, the accuracy of the prescription is dependent on correct FTP settings. There are three Assessment days in the program [one in the first week, one at week 6, and one in the final week] to help ensure FTP is set correctly and to track progress over the 12 weeks.
Remember that FTP should not be based on "unicorn" days of the best PR power of all times; this is likely to set all other workouts at too high of an intensity. It is better to set FTP off of a realistic assessment. More is not always better, if it was everyone would just get better by riding as hard as possible on every ride.
What not to expect: this program is pre-written and it not a customized program by definition. If you feel you would be best served by custom written training with feedback from an expert level coach, please visit our coaching page at https://www.teamefcoaching.com to learn more.
At Team EF Coaching, we love riding. We love training, racing, and pushing ourselves. We are a unique collection of world-class coaches, elite riders, and nutritionists. And just like you, we always push to improve. Whatever it is you want to achieve on the bike, we want you to hit your target, and we have the knowledge to make it happen. We’ll use our hard-learned lessons from 20 years as a professional team to help you exceed your goals.