This is one of my favorite workouts because it can be done in an hour or less, but still provides great benefit. It's one of the hardest workouts I'll post because you don't get much rest. I did this workout a bunch when training for the cross country ride and other century rides.

1. 15 Min: Warmup
2. 2 Min: Zone 4 (80-90% of Max heart rate) You should feel a burning in your legs, but this isn't an all out effort.
3. 1 Min: Zone 5 (91-100% of max heart rate) This should be an all out effort. Don't leave anything behind.
4. Repeat steps 2 & 3 three times.
5. 5-10 Min: Easy peddling
6. 2 Min: Zone 4 (80-90% of Max heart rate) You should feel a burning in your legs, but this isn't an all out effort.
7. 1 Min: Zone 5 (91-100% of max heart rate) This should be an all out effort. Don't leave anything behind.
8. Repeat steps 6 & 7 three times.
9. 15 Min: Cooldown 

You can shorten this workout by decreasing the repetitions to two times instead of three or decrease your recovery time in between sets. I wouldn't cut it below 5 min though. 

How do you prepare your body for the rigors of riding across the US? Riding across America isn't a sprint, it's more like a marathon, or many, many marathons day after day. I believe one of the most important parts of your training is hardening your mind and body to suffer the rigors of a long-distance ride. In this post I will explain how I created my training plan. Other posts will share some of the specific workouts that I performed.

One note upfront, I would recommend you start riding with you gear early on in your training plan. The weight will really change the handling of your bike (as well as make hills seem much steeper!). Get used to riding with your gear, it will pay dividends later on.

Once you've decided when you are going to ride across the country you should develop a training plan. The training plan serves several purposes: (1) It helps keep you disciplined when you don't feel like riding. (2) It ensures that you get the right types of training before starting your ride. (3) It helps to keep you from getting burned out due to overtraining before the ride. 

What Types of Training Did I Do?

Long distance rides: These rides can start with 20 miles and work up to 70 or more. These rides get your body used to sitting on your bike for long periods. They also build the base endurance that you will need. You should try to maintain a comfortable pace during the ride. These are great rides to do with groups.

Interval Rides: There is a growing body of research that shows the value of intense intervals. I remember reading that intervals were a great way to compress a much longer ride into an hour. You will feel pain, but your body needs that stress to strengthen. Intervals workouts formed the basis of much of my training. In other posts I have provided some of the interval workouts that I performed.

As I look back at our ride across America, it's easy to pinpoint the most difficult part of the ride: maintaining the mental discipline to wake up early and keep peddling mile after mile, day after day. For the first two weeks each morning my body would hurt more and more. As we rode on, the idea that my body would toughen to the riding seemed to become more and more elusive.

On the second day of the ride, we woke up to a cool, rainy morning in eastern Georgia. The weather was miserable. We had roughly 92 miles to bike. As Jimmy and I slowly peddled our bikes, I felt as if each joint in my body was creaking, telling me not to go on. Yet we continued. It rained, we were wet, but we made it to our camp.

Please check back within the next few weeks to view my training information.