Training for the STP: How easily can you do something well enough?

Last year, when training for our second STP together, we decided it would be our final one.  Getting into shape at our age is a big commitment for the months of April, May, and June.  We could do some riding over the winter, but not a lot given we were on road trips.  So it seemed that when we returned home, we were either riding, preparing to ride, or recovering from a ride.

Then, the STP came, and it was so much fun that we sort of reconsidered.  Then, Sean said he wanted to do another one, and that sealed the deal.

We are training once again.

But this time it's different.  This April we started slow, with 11 mile rides, then 23-mile rides, then 30 mile rides, then mixing them, and then a 53 mile ride.  What we seem to be finding is that more frequent, short rides are leading to more rapid improvement than the longer rides.

This will be my 5th STP, plus a summer after my first where I was recovering from foot surgery and went ahead and did all of the same training as if I was going to do one.  For all of the previous years I, and then we, worked our way up to fairly difficult (for us) centuries (100 mile rides) figuring that we would then be ready for the 100 mile rides on the STP.

But now we are wondering if we had been on the wrong track about this.  Perhaps those long rides, being pretty grueling on our island which is nothing but one hill after another, don't provide the benefits that we thought they did.  After all, we are not training for rides with Whidbey Island hills--the STP is fairly flat, with one or two real hills on the first day, and a few rollers on the second day.

Maybe, at our age, and without a long history of cycling, those longer rides took too much out of us, made it so that we had to spend too many days recuperating before the next ride.

Because I have a GPS we can monitor our progress, and this month we have made a lot of progress.  We can do the 11 mile ride as fast as we could at the end of last season.

So what we are going to do is try to ride about every day, with a couple of long rides on the flat Burke-Gilman trail in Seattle.  In other words, we are going to see if a more gentle approach works just as well.  If it does, then looking forward to another year of training in the future won't be so bad.

The author of the book, The Searchers, which was the basis for the John Wayne film, wrote a line in another of his cowboy stories that has stuck with me for many years.  It was this, in talking about one of the cowboys in his book:

"His religion was that it mattered less how well you did something than how easily you could do it well enough."

Maybe we can reap all of the fitness benefits of training for and doing the STP "well enough" by cutting back on the difficult parts of our training.  We are going to experiment with this.

Vicky, on one of our cold rides, as seen through my Go-Pro Camera (which is always trained on her):