How much training do I really need...?
 

Okay, so... last year I didn't ride much, and my conditioning suffered. I was still able to ride a 400 and a 1000 without terrible pain, but I felt slow.

This year is worse. Very little riding since March, though I did a 140 mile ride on my fixed gear last week.

But I'm signed up for the Iron Porcupine 1200. I'm not worried about a DNQ (there is no Q in this case), but I do want to enjoy the ride and finish more or less on schedule.

I don't have much time for "training" before then, so I need to do the bare minimum. No more, no less.

Any suggestions?

Ride 2 or 3 100km rides a week.

I do a few shorter hard sessions in the next week or two and then focus on what unterhausen says, hopefully the shorter difficult rides provide a bit of a kickstart to things? If I were in this situation I'd also really try and optimize my time at controls, it's never something I've been very good at or had a lot of reason to change but given the small field of riders it should be a good one to try and maximize sleep time instead of shooting the breeze at the other controls.

I think the bare minimum is 3 rides a week. One long one (4+ hours) on the weekend and two hard ones (1-2 hours) during the week. We're using ePOP for the IP so you can skip some of the stops all together if you can carry enough food and water on the bike.

I am intriqued and somewhat relieved that someone with almost 20k posts(all of which are on point and clearly informed) is asking a training question. And you've done very little riding since March, but you just rode 140 miles on a fixed gear? Lube your chain. You are ready.

Gotta admit, that's very impressive. Beats anything I've done this year, save maybe my grueling 90 mile, 10k elevation ride in PA two months ago. Those constant hills near OhioPlye killed me. (I didn't know about the Alleghany Passage at the time, but I'm going back to it soon).

Thanks, guys!

So the consensus is I don't need to do a 300, 400, 600? That's a relief.

After about fifteen miles on the fixie last week my saddle started hurting me pretty bad, and I thought I'd have to bail for sure, but that pain went away. Legs were sure heavy for a couple days afterwards, though.

If your only goal is to finish, you don't really need to be that fit, just determined. Training minimizes the suffering.

I think it's too late to do anything other than a 300, and I don't really think that's necessary. A 200 might be good practice. You might be a bit miserable on the second day. I always feel like crap the day after any ride over 100 miles. But then I do fine on 1200k's.

I think the main prep you should take is getting some lantiseptic skin protectant in case of saddle sores.