The plans set out in magazines and books can look really good but I wonder how many amateur cyclists ever follow them in practice?
I know I never had. And I've tried - setting out my own programme of workouts week by week, day by day.
But somehow it all goes wrong very quickly, why's that?
1) Life gets in the way - the plan calls for a big bike ride every Saturday for the next 3 weeks but the 2nd Saturday has a special family event that you can't get out of so your big ride can't be done.
2) Monday is a rest day - this is a classic of almost all plans, the thinking is that the amateur cyclist will have trained all weekend so Monday should be off. But the amateur cyclist is also probably a full-time worker and has to turn up early Monday morning to put in a full day of work - so its not really a rest day.
3) Make the most of the weekends - this is the corollary of the Monday rest. Hammer yourself all weekend is the idea but in practice a Saturday or especially a Sunday may be the amateur cyclist's only real day of rest.
4) Complicated, zone based training sessions - can be quite difficult to manage by yourself during a ride - perhaps you need to get a coach and do it on a track? Oh, right you're an amateur and don't have all those facilities.
I sometimes suspect that these training programmes are written by coaches of professionals and all they have done is change the quantities to reflect the lower capacity of the typical amateur cyclist.
What they haven't done is take into account how the amateur rider is fundamentally different from the professional.
Italian events and European climbs