← All posts
Tips and tricks for riding long hours on the indoor trainer
When I started training for the Mallorca312 I knew it would involve a lot of indoor training. I’ve historically not enjoyed indoor training and found this prospect daunting. I’ve had to learn to tolerate it, here are some of my tips and experiences that may help you if you find yourself in the same situation.
You have many options for equipment – but whichever method you choose you need to ensure;
I have the Wahoo indoor training bike, it’s the best I’ve found. I also had a Wahoo trainer that I could fix my bike onto (the bike I would be doing the Mallorca 312 on), but that broke.
When you do your first hour, it feels hard. When you do your first two hours, it feels hard. When you do your first 3 hours, it feels hard. But once you’ve completed those 3 hours (or you may be able to tolerate more, I found that was my limit) the 1-hour is easy.
Unlike riding outside, you are in a much more stagnant position on the bike, it does get uncomfortable. Getting up out of the saddle for 10 seconds, every minute for some intervals helped me.
Much indoor training is in the head, so it’s training your brain to shut up.
I struggled with boredom during long sweet spot intervals or endurance rides. Watching a series on Netflix was the best way I found to combat that. I know others find podcasts helpful, but for me it was an easy to watch series.
For the hard interval training sessions, I found that watching TV didn’t work, only loud music could get me through it. I created a playlist of songs, sometimes I could sing to (not in the breathless hard intervals of course!), and added and changed this over time so it didn’t become monotonous.
I struggle with clock watching, I find it harms my mind. Instead of thinking “I’ve done 10-mins”, my brain thinks “argh I still have 10-mins to go, this is hard”.I started not looking at the clock, and this helped immensely. On intervals where I was listening to music, I knew roughly how many songs the interval would take – and I found some weird enjoyment about trying to time the intervals based on that.
Whatever takes your mind off the challenge, time and discomfort is a good thing. These things worked for me, but it took me some time to figure it out, see what works for you.
When you are training at home or the gym, not 40km away from home, you don’t need to keep riding to get home. So, the old brain plays tricks on you, “you can just stop and do more tomorrow”, “this is too hard, you are too tired, stop” “, it’s too late in the day, only do half the time today”.
It is tempting to listen to the brain but instead listen to your body. There may be times when you are too tired, or you haven’t eaten right and training that day isn’t valuable, but they should be few and far between – and you should be minimising them as you get more experience. Most of the time, it’s your brain, and you can continue doing a lot more than your brain thinks you can. Tell brain to shut up.