Long ride for sprint training

If it were me, I'd focus on building up to a long ride of 2.5-3 hours with some varying length intervals within it. 

My informal, unscientific, inexperienced, BOP, just-finish-with-a-smile-on-my-face target has been "at least 50% extra" for each discipline.  So for a sprint bike of 15 miles, that's a standalone ride of 22.5 miles.

My first sprint was 25km bike, and I never did more than 25km standalone.  Can't recommend that.

Having done just one race so far, a sprint, I was riding 20-30 miles a ride pretty routinely several days a week. 

I was told by someone more experienced than I that a good measure would be to ride on your 'long' ride as you expected the race to take.  The idea being you were getting the body used to 90 minutes or two hours or whatever you expect of continuous effort.  Seemed to make sense to me, with the caveat that I am a newbie.

No, it's not a joke. And it's not a requirement either. It depends on the overall program one wants to and has time to complete. I may have several rides a week of that size depending on what I'm doing. For a sprint, the OP stated riding 10-27 miles or so (iirc), which is actually plenty to make it. But to really get the most out of things, one should look more at how to improve their bike fitness as opposed to being so specific to a distance. It's not a coincidence that the guys who train hard and place very well at say, HIM races will also do very well overall in short races such as sprints. As for what to do no a 2.5-3 hr ride, I'd say build up to handle it, and then work your way up to including tempo or sweet spot blocks in them. These can work very well towards improving fitness when used in concert with harder threshold and VO2 level training.

If you want to finish, 25 is probably fine.  If you want to place and/or be more competitive, then you probably want closer to 50.

Welcome to BT.  Word of Advice-We all should strive to be a bit more?.....tolerant...of others opinions.  

Just sayin. 

Pretty much what my response would have been. 

From what I gathered, the OP was not asking about the distance of his long ride in order to finish the race.  He asked what distance would give him the most benefit.  And for most AGers, assuming you have the time, I think that building up to 2.5 to 3 hours of with some hard efforts (sweet spot and tempo as mentioned above) will give you a lot of bang for your buck.  The OP also stated he was riding 3-4x per week, at 13-27 per...so he's got a decent base of 50-75 mpw to build upon and is at or more than most novice/intermediate sprint plans recommend to begin with.

Now if you don't have the time or desire to ride 2.5-3 hours in training for a sprint, then that's perfectly fine and normal. But if you can build up to it, with harder efforts, you'll see a ton of benefit there as far as cycling fitness improvements.

I'll work back up to 50+ even though I'm only doing sprints this year, but that's just because I enjoy long group rides. I used to try to triple each of the distances. My logic was that if I could triple each one then I could do them all together. It's not great logic (which becomes clear upon moving up to HIM), but gives you a line of what is clearly overkill as opposed to possibly overkill.

All that to say anywhere from 20-25 seems reasonable unless you just want to ride farther.

Would you be able to offer a bit more info on what you mean by 'tempo'  and  'sweet spot' ?

Thanks,

kelly

FTP (Functional Threshold Power) is basically the maximum effort you can sustain for 1 hour.

Based on that, you can determine several training zones.  More information in detail can be found here.

http://home.trainingpeaks.com/articles/cycling/power-training-levels,-by-andrew-coggan.aspx

Tempo is roughly 76-90% of your FTP.  Basically an effort you could hold all out for 2.5-3 hours assuming you were fresh and rested. 

Sweet spot is an inbetween zone of Tempo and Threshold (Threshold is 90-105% of FTP).  Roughly 88-93% depending on who you ask.  This zone is considered to have the benefits of harder riding that comes from the higher levels of the threshold zone with less of the recovery impact.  IOW, you may get more of the benefits without feeling as wasted after.  Thus the term "sweet spot."

For a long ride of 2.5-3 hours, you may have a couple 20-25 minute tempo efforts, and a few 10-15 minute efforts at sweet spot.

of course if you ask triathletes for an answer you'll get five different ones. There's a lot of really good information here but they can all be separated into two categories of "training to finish" and "training to go faster".

I agree with the 2.5-3hr bike rides--they make anything up to 18 miles feel like absolutely nothing and incredibly short, which means you feel like and you absolutely can push the pace much harder than you would otherwise. Incorporating those sweet spot & tempo blocks will definitely increase speed.

Edit: My understanding of sweet spot & tempo riding were incorrect.

Ben and Jason give some good advice.

If you really wanted to peak for a sprint, one could continue to build your total training load (think of this as fitness) by increasing volume in the way they suggest several months before the target race.  As the race approaches (let's say two to three months before it), reduce volume significantly and add more intensity so your training more closely resembles what you will do on race day, then begin to build volume again with the more race-specific training in the mix up until you taper.

This is the overall concept of periodization - that training progresses from general to specific.

Discussing time (or distance) is only part of the equation.  Intensity has to be factored in too, or you won't get the results you're capable of.

Edited to correct poor typing skills.

I've been focusing on just doing local sprints (~15.5 mile bike each) the past few years and try to ride 3x per week when in training mode.  2x is on the trainer doing the BT cycling program using virtual power and 1x is a long outdoor ride on the weekend.  This long ride will be anywhere from 25 to 60 miles.  I've also been riding some with a group that does a nice 45 miler and helps me pickup the pace, this ride for me is a total of 54 miles.

I use a guideline of 2.0-2.5 run race distance and 3-4x for biking for the longest sprint training distances.