Training
Training
To improve your ten-mile time trial time you need to increase your efficiency.
A good training session to do that is to ride at a pace that you can sustain for two hours but if you were having a conversation you’d have to keep pausing for breathe. You’ll know about it when you finish but you should be able to do it again the next day.
Then, to improve lactate tolerance, do a ride which includes a warm-up, then do 15, 12 and eight-minute blocks with ten minutes recovery between each, and with each block at a high intensity – the maximum for that distance, not the absolute maximum to start with, otherwise you’ll die off and slow down.
Psychologically it’s important that the three efforts get shorter. You’re riding over threshold – just – but because it’s a short enough chunk of time, and each block is getting shorter, it makes it mentally manageable. At the end of the ride you’ve done more than half-an-hour of high intensity work, so it’s a good session but mentally tolerable. That used to be the biggest part of my job as a rider – to package the work I had to do in a way that made it do-able.