Hi. I’m 69 and planning on doing my first on road Century on my 70th bday in August 2022. I’m in decent shape but my FTP is only 181
I’m looking for the best Zwift training plan for this - can someone suggest something?
Thanks!
Hi Robert, I’m not a coach, so you will have to take my advice with a grain of salt. Century rides are mostly long zone 2 (the blue zone on Zwift) rides. Time in the saddle is one of the best ways to prepare. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also train other zones such as your 5 minute power for example. Also, don’t forget about strength training. Everyone over the age of 40 should be incorporating some resistance training, once you are in your 70’s the muscle mass depletes even faster, so don’t forget to hit the weights a few times a week. “loaded bones are happy bones”
There are a few plans on Zwift, one of them for a gran fondo, but a lot of people think the training plans on Zwift are garbage… so you may want to do some more research on training plans for a century or get one from a certified coach.
I’m mid 40’s and been getting back into cycling slowly over the last 4 years via spin classes at the gym to getting back onto the road with my mountain bike (with usually 25km rides and maybe 4 50km rides all summer), to Zwift the winter before this one to buying a road bike last summer and ending up doing 100km rides nearly every weekend and a couple of 100 mile rides.
I would credit that winter of Zwift of getting my fitness from being able to cycle 2 hours to going to 6 hours. I did do the gran fondo plan last winter and enjoyed it. The biggest thing I took from it was just being in the saddle for longer periods. The plan is roughly 4 workouts a week with one of them being a free ride. From memory most workouts are around 1 hour, but it includes 1 longer ride a week which starts around the hour, but gets longer as the plan goes on and works up to around 3 hours. After I had finished that I tried completing all the route badges which includes some long routes that are close to the century, I think the PRL full is the only one over 100 miles.
The biggest thing to doing my centuries last summer was finding a small group of cyclists that I rode with all summer and without them I never would have done so much.
If you are relatively new to cycling or to training then I think the plans on Zwift are ok and if you haven’t done longer times in the saddle before then the gran fondo plan is a good way of increasing it. After doing the build me up plan recently, that did help a lot with my cadence (also showed me the gran fondo plan did nothing at all for cadence), but didn’t help my power as much as I would have hoped. I am considering trying a dedicated training platform to see if their plans are better.
Thanks Mark. I also row and box/kickbox and do some light weight work, walk 4-5 miles day and play pickleball. Can you suggest some non-swift training plans or how to find a certified coach? Thanks again!
Thanks David Can you recommend some dedicated training platforms or how to find them? Thanks for all the advice/info!
The two that I know of and am thinking of looking at are https://www.trainingpeaks.com/ and https://www.trainerroad.com/
I haven’t used either so I really can’t give any feedback on either of them. From other posts on here it seems there is some integration between peaks and Zwift in that you can somehow get the training peaks workout into Zwift and do it as a workout. With trainer road there is no integration and if you want to do a workout in trainer road you have to run both at the same time and have your smart trainer controllable by trainer road.