Welcome everybody to the podcast. It's dedicated to making you a faster cyclist the Ask a cycling coach podcast presented by trainer road.

This is the podcast where you can get answers to your coaching questions from certified coaches. My name is Jonathan Lee. I'm a certified coach and I take up the PR duties here at trainer road and joining me today is coach Chad Timmerman. How you doing Chad?

I'm doing great Jonathan. Thanks.

And founder of trainer road Nate Pearson. How you doing Nate?

Doing good.

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So we'll kick it off right now. We've got a lot of questions to go through today. So we'll start with Ian's question.

And we're going to kind of have a common theme here where we go through training plant plan selection questions before we move on to other ones.

Ian asks, are there any, do you guys have any tips for preparing for a 24 hour mountain bike race in July 2016?

Any base build and specialty plans that you would recommend?

Yes, so Ian, 24 hour event definitely qualifies as ultra endurance, which makes me lean toward traditional base as your base approach.

You can decide between the two, but that's the one I would recommend. And then because it is an ultra endurance ultra endurance event, I'd recommend tacking on the additional two weeks on the end of each of those.

Before moving on to a sustained power build and then probably the marathon mountain bike plan would be your best bet.

In any case, you've got the requisite 34 weeks that you would need for to accommodate the extended base period and then the subsequent eight week build and specialty phases.

So I have a question for those who aren't trained or own members. What did you just say? What does that mean?

So in terms of base being out there and I'm assuming this is an individual event where you're not relaying for an hour or a lap of the course, but you're riding the entire 24 hours and correct me if I'm wrong.

But if that's the case, then you're going to rely heavily on a strong aerobic base and the traditional approach to base conditioning is long slow distance where you basically teach your body to metabolize fat as it's preferred fuel source.

And you do that at low intensities and long durations. So multiple hours in the saddle working at pretty light intensities. And then as you move into your sustained or into your build period where you're trying to build slightly more specific fitness, your shifts, your emphasis is going to shift more toward muscular endurance, which is at a higher percentage of your functional threshold where you're working at 85, maybe 95% of threshold for extended durations.

And then in your case, because this is a mountain bike event, a mountain bike specialty plan, which addresses the wide ranging demands of mountain bike riding.

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