How Many Miles do You Cycle?

One of the most frequent questions I get asked is how many miles do you cycle?

When I first got back into cycling in 2003/2004, I didn’t used to race, I just cycled for the fun of it. Part of the fun was cycling all day – 100-150 miles in the Cotswolds or Yorkshire Dales. I remember one day cycling to Cambridge and back 180 miles in the middle of winter. This gave big weekly mileages of perhaps 300 miles a week. I would regularly churn out 1,000 plus miles a month. It was great, the only target was miles and I would diligently note down every mile cycled in my notebook.

When I started racing, I  found mileage would go down. Churning out the miles doesn’t necessarily make you go faster. If you train at a high intensity, you need more rest and recovery and so doing big mileages can be counter-productive. One of the drawbacks of a busy racing schedule, is that I don’t make so much time for long easy century rides.
A typical week this season has been

• Sat: 10 mile TT
• Sun 25 mile TT
• Mon rest
• Tues 70 miles hard with hill intervals
• Wed 30 miles recovery ride (or nothing)
• Thurs 30 miles – either hard or gentle depending how I feel
• Fri rest

That gives 170 miles (plus 40 slow commuting miles, which I don’t really count as training though they can be useful for recovery rides). That’s around 200 miles a week. But, sometimes it is less. This season after two races at weekend, I don’t feel like training on Tuesday so delay the hard ride to Wednesday.

In September and October, the mileage will be even less, as it will all be for hill climbs. There will be no 70 mile rides and races will be 1 mile rather than 25 miles. It can be as low as 100 miles a week in height of racing season.

Fitness Levels and Miles

As you get fitter, one thing you notice is that you can do more high intensity riding for longer.  When I started cycling, I would take much longer to recover from a race or training. The number of hill intervals would be less. As you develop endurance over a season and over the years, you can recover quicker and train at both a higher volume and intensity. This is one reason it doesn’t work to look at someone else’s training plan and try and copy that. It depends where your body is at.

I also feel the greater recovery rate this season is partly due to better diet.

Stress and Recovery

There are times when you need to ‘overtrain’ and push your body to make improvements. Perhaps overtrain is the wrong word, but in a month, it is good to have one week where you go above your average and above your comfort zone. (stress and recovery) It is a fine balance between pushing out of your comfort zone and not overtraining. Because I often get busy with other things, I tend more towards extra rest.

Hard Weeks

For example, I don’t have any more races until September 4th (British Time trial Championships). At the end of August, I also have two weeks in New York, where it is harder to train. The idea is to make this week a high mileage and high intensity week. There are no races to worry about at the weekend, so if I finish week tired that’s fine. Then in New York the training will be shorter duration, leaving me more fresh for race in early September.

Of course, it doesn’t always work out. I planned to do 80 miles yesterday, but ended up doing 40 as a gas boiler took all day to install. But, I’ll be training hard all this week.

Winter Training

These days, I often do more miles in winter. The plan was to do 1,000 miles in January, February and March, but like most plans it didn’t happen. The weather was really bad, then in Feb and march a knee injury kept me off the bike, so I ended up doing quite a low winter mileage. It didn’t seem to adversely affect my performance this year though! If anything I’ve gone better than ever before, despite losing 5-6 weeks

• Winter cycling training

How many miles do you cycle? or do you not bother to count?