Womens Bicycle Racing

The following PDF is the suggested training plan for the first block of the year, called “Base” because we are working on building up an aerobic base, building endurance and teaching our bodies to burn fat for fuel. The time commitment ranges from 3.5 hrs to 6.5 hrs per week. Each week is progressively higher in volume until week 4 which cuts back in volume.

In week four, our group training will be a “Lactate Threshold Field Test” to establish HR training zones and some baseline speed and fitness to use in order to track our training progress individually.

Until you do the HR test, you should base your ride intenisity on “Rating of Perceived Exertion” or RPE.

Read the article to familiarize yourself with the concept of RPE. Print out the article & make copies of the RPE chart to refer to frequently.

Print out the Base one training plan and post it where you can reference it daily:

SCE Group Training Plan - Base 1

Finally, you’ll need a place to log your workouts. This is extremely important so that you can refer to it later in order to track down things that worked, things that didn’t work and to keep track of total training time.

At a minimum you should log the activity that you did, a few notes about the route, the amount of time you actually worked out, and any notes about nutrition or drinking that you’d like to refer back to later.

Here are two sources for free online training logs:

Beginner Triathlete

Training Peaks

Beginner Triathlete is totally free and is a great community of active and very helpful triathletes. I post there as “AdventureBear”. Training Peaks is the software I use for my coached athletes. The trick here is to sign up for a regular account, which will require your credit card. After the 7 day free trial, simply cancel your subscription, and you will still have access to the “log only” mode of the training log.

Let me know if you have any questions.