What's the training plan for Petoji?
It all starts with a base. First of all, I've been riding seriously for 10 years and have averaged over 11,500 miles during the past 5 years. I've completed more than 325 100-mile rides, including one per week in 2012 and 2013. I have enough miles in my legs to trust that, with the proper training, I can complete the ride. My training will have two areas of focus.
My first focal point is riding hard on consecutive days. For most of my riding life I've focused on one long ride per week, usually giving myself one recovery day before and after that long ride. In 2015 I need to train myself to ride hard on consecutive days. My specific Petoji training began in December of 2014 when I rode 400 miles in 4 days and continued in January when I did 4 100-mile days in a row. In an ideal world I would keep on building until I could do 1,000 miles in 10 days. However, I don't have enough free days to do that. Instead, I'll do one week a month where I do back-to-back 100 mile days on the weekend and add as much intense riding as I can during the week. This will be my way of training myself to ride hard day after day.
My second focus is increasing the length of a "comfortable" long ride. I don't know why, but 100 miles has always been that magic number to me. My long weekly ride is almost always very close to that 100 mile mark. Rarely do I ride 120-150 miles or so. It seems like I'm either doing 100 miles or I jump straight up to 200. 100 is very comfortable to me and my mind and body tend to think they are done after that point. However, Petoji averages 130 miles/day, so I would like to be comfortable at 130 miles. That's a long way of saying that I want to get my long weekly ride up in the 130 range. This shouldn't be too difficult, and I'll start ramping up in March.
Aside from those two points of emphasis, I'll just try to ride as much as I can. I've been lucky to have some time off in January, so I should get well over 1,000 miles for the month. Things will get busy again in February, and with the short days I'll probably focus on intervals and then ramp up the mileage again in March. Starting in March I will begin to increase the mileage of my weekly long ride and I'll try to fit in 6 days in a row of riding hard on consecutive days as mentioned above. In April I'll go up to 8, then 10 in May and June. I'll relax a little in July and focus on doing intervals again.
I know it's not the perfect plan and I'm not the most scientific-based rider out there. However, I believe that this plan will work for me and I'm looking forward to putting it to the test.
