The kids are all out of school and I’m in a bit of a lull in the travel schedule. Since I decided to try hard to work my exercise program around my schedule rather than allow my schedule to kill my program consistancy, I had thought about a “summer base” season. I began on the bike in earnest earlier this year, but I didn’t try to build up miles in a typical base. I just went from running and indoor intervals to longer outdoor riding sessions combined with hard interval rides when time was short. I tried to time longer travel weeks to be recovery weeks or I piled up effort at one end of the week knowing the other end of the week would be spent in airports, on planes, recovering from jet lag or photo walks in cities.
I was happy to see Chris Carmichael put together a similar program for Outside Magazine this year. It’s an interval based twelve week program building to a 3 and a half hour long ride, very similar to the idea that I had going into the spring. So much nicer to see some emphasis in these programs on speed in addition to long endurance riding.
Now that the time pressure is eased a bit and the days are long, I’ve upped the hours and dialed down the intensity. Joe Friel mentions it in cycling “training bible” and has written about it on his blog:
Joe Friel’s Blog: Summer Base: “I’d highly recommend it as a way of kicking off the second half of the season. “
June may be the first month where I top 30 hours of training. Hopefully July into August will be similar. I’ll then dial back the hours and up the intensity as fall arrives. It’s something of a reverse priodization where power and intervals are emphasized early on and as time on the bike increase they are used to build endurance.
