10 training tips to help you nail your next sportive, even though it’s not a race

(Image credit: Wattbike)

For many of us, it’ll be the time of the year where we’re planning what sportives we’d like to tick off our bucket-list this season. However, training in the depths of winter isn’t always an appealing proposition, but don’t fret; cycling indoors can help you prepare perfectly.

As architects and industrial designers have been challenged to accommodate more activity and habitation in smaller spaces, indoor training equipment and ergonomics have seen remarkable improvements. Crowded cities, expensive floorspace and noise sensitivity have revolutionised the way engineers think about designing indoor trainers. The result has been a new generation of static bikes which are a lot more pleasant to live with and amazingly lifelike to train on. Whereas indoor trainers were once unsightly creations, spoiling the flow of your home’s interior design, the latest offerings are sleek and refined.

Training indoors will help to guarantee the quality of a workout away from traffic and poor weather, and spending hours on an indoor trainer isn’t the arduous affair that it used to be. Thankfully, improved turbo trainer technology and software such as Zwift makes training indoors a more attractive proposition than it has ever been. Most turbos will give you at the very least an estimated power output, while more advanced trainers like the Wattbike Atom give highly-accurate measures, ensuring you can track your training perfectly.

Training consistently is better than doing 1 or 2 huge rides each week, but juggling cycling and work can be difficult and requires some planning. Take a look at your schedule a few weeks ahead and decide where you can fit in your training whilst minimising the risk of you missing sessions. Remember to be flexible though; there are days where you won’t be able to complete the 4-hour epic you’d planned but don’t fret. If you’re running short on time, even a 30-minute session can be beneficial.

One of the biggest attractions of a sportive is the physical and mental challenge of cycling large distances. Winter is a great time of the year to build base fitness, and long steady rides are key to this. Try progressing the duration of these rides over time to get your body used to the strain you’ll be putting it under during your sportive. Although efforts at and above threshold are where you can make up some time on the climbs, all your recovery from these efforts will be aerobic, so it’s doubly important to maximise your body’s aerobic capacity with long rides.

If your training plan requires you to do 4 hours on the bike at the weekend, but non-cycling activities are going to get in the way, try splitting it up. By doing two rides, one in the morning and one in the evening, you’ll still get the same volume of cycling completed, and you don’t have to neglect your work or family life. Recent research has shown that splitting rides between the morning and afternoon, whilst carefully controlling carbohydrate intake between rides, can even increase how much we adapt to training.

Many sportives will challenge your ability to climb for long periods of time, so you should hone your ability to climb at low cadences and out of the saddle. It can be hard to find long climbs in the UK to train on, so why not try Alpe Du Zwift? With over 1000m of climbing, mimicking the iconic Alpe D’Huez, there can surely be no better way of preparing yourself for the climbs you’ll encounter in your sportive.

Your sportive is unlikely to be a steady ride, instead, people will surge on climbs or you'll want to bridge across a gap to a group ahead of you and recover quickly enough to hold your position. To do this you will want to start integrating some interval sessions into your training. The use of an erg mode on smart turbo trainers or smart bikes is perfect to ensure you hit your target watts during your intervals without having to think too much about it. Just keep your head down, and keep your legs spinning!

As you get fitter, you’ll find your normal rides and intervals easier, and for good reason. You aren’t putting your body under as much stress, and you need that very stress to force your body to adapt to the training you're doing. To overcome this, you should gradually increase the length of your long rides and the intensity of your intervals. If training with power, frequently assess your fitness to reset your training zones and continually increase your effort for the same session, or try adding 30 minutes to your long rides to build your endurance base. By constantly, but gradually, increasing your training load, you can make some huge gains.

Indoor cycling was once a mixture of agony and anti-social behaviour. Static bikes were noisy and suffered from horribly artificial pedalling interfaces. They were seen as an absolute last resort within any training programme. Today’s indoor trainers are splendidly sophisticated and make logging your training miles a rewarding experience. There is also no burden of servicing bearings, tension bands, mechanical drivetrain cogs, chainring or setting cable tension – as you would on a road bike. Indoor trainers allow you the opportunity for brutal training mileages and intensity without the costly component wear that an equivalent effort would tally on your road bike.