Debusama

2012 was a big year for me on the bike. I had a job that allowed for a lot of time riding and I was out on the bike most every day. I threw in some LT intervals and sprint drills from time to time, but for the most part, I just did a ****-load of riding. I also did a lot of racing and some winning, which resulted in a cat-3 upgrade. Last year I got a new job which made it harder for me to find time to train and race. I only did a few races and wasn't particularly happy with my performance. This year I am getting the hang of my schedule and I should be able to fit about 8 hours/week of training time into my routine, which is still less than the 12 hours/week I put in during my best year. To compensate for the reduced time, I’m structuring my workouts a little more

My “A” race is a stage race in late April, and I also signed up on somewhat of a whim for a 50-mile mountain bike race the weekend before that stage race. I’m not going to do too much training specifically for the mountain bike race, but I am thinking about replacing my hill repeat road workout with mountain bike rides for two reasons:
1: I live about two blocks from a really good trail network. With the rout I plan to do I can pack 4 nasty little climbs in to a ride that takes less than an hour starting and ending at my house. The hill repeat workout I would do on road would take an extra 45 minutes out of my day getting to and from the hill. My long weekend road rides will include plenty of climbing as well.
2: If I am going to do a mountain bike race, I don’t want to let my off-road skills get too rusty.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how much of a difference dong my hill workouts on a mountain bike would make for road racing performance?
The main thing I can think of is that I would miss the out-of- the saddle climbing, but I can make an effort to get out of the saddle more on my other rides to compensate for it. The road race I’m dong doesn't really have any grades steep enough to get me out of the saddle anyway. I did the race a few years ago, and the only time I had to stand up was in the second lap after a broke the front derailleur and had to do the rest of the race on my big ring.

waterrockets 

Your VO2Max zone is your VO2Max zone. Your physiology will not know the difference. Be mindful of cadence and consistency, at least somewhat. As long as you still get some good efforts on the road bike every week or two (not repeated), you should be fine.

Also, you can get out of the saddle on your mountain bike. It may require a smooth stroke, but that's hardly bad.

Andy STi

I always try to do a couple to a few MTB races a year and I like to train on my MTB also. Hill repeats on the mountain bike are great. The hills are steep and it really works on your technique. As WR said, your zones are the same so you're still getting a great workout.

Is your April race Walla Walla? If so, I'll see you there

carpediemracing 

You have a nice situation. Use the mtb for more intense efforts, the road bike for more prolonged ones. The two sort of complement each other. Just make sure that it's not foreign to climb on the road bike and that you get enough saddle time on the mountain bike, meaning enough to be appropriate for a 50 mile event.

Debusama

It is Walla Walla. Are you Cat3?

Debusama

Living in Spokane Washington is generally a fantastic situation for a cyclist: It's small enough that you're never far from mountain trails or endless miles of rolling low-traffic country roads, but has a shockingly active race scene for a city of only 200K people. Crits on tuesdays, xc mountain bike races on Wednesdays, longer road races a couple times each month throughout the spring and summer and two local cross series in the fall.

Andy STi

I'm an old and slow cat1. Love Tour of Walla Walla though, always a good time. Bunch of 3s from Bend will be doing it too.

carpediemracing 

Heh. I like this. Generally speaking the more experienced riders won't announce their category so a good way to ask if that's the case is to say, "What category are you doing?".

I did this when I was newer to the sport, asking guys if they were a Cat 3 (to me that was incredible) and they'd be a 2 or even a 1. Later, as in the last 10 years, I experienced the opposite. I was riding with a group in SoCal, totally impressed with the group's strength, etiquette, poise, etc. I asked one of them if he was a Cat 2 (when in doubt that's the category - if he's a 1 or a pro it's okay and it's flattering to everyone else). To my shock the guy answered that he had just gotten his Cat 5 license and he hadn't raced yet.

I fell victim to my own biases when I asked a BF member what category he raced. I thought he was a 3. Ends up he's a 1 and a good one at that.

tetonrider

my experience suggests that there is a little more to this. i've ridden with power on the road for quite some time and the past few years with power on my mountain bikes. what i've discovered is that for the same perceived exertion, power on the MTB is lower than the road bike.

i have thought a bunch about why this is and suspect it is some combination of terrain (tires can slip, MTB terrain is even less consistent than roads), position on the bike (should be at least similar for MTB & road but can be different for some), and the fact that MTB involves engaging more muscles in the core and requires more use of the upper body.

riding the MTB is great training and lots of fun, but i find that while it can leave me more physically drained than riding on the road if one's goal is to target time in particular upper end zones one is less likely to hit those targets. 300W on the MTB might feel like 340 due to the above factors, but riding 300W on the MTB doesn't make it any easier to ride 340W on the road.

there are TONS of benefits from riding a MTB. wish that all road racers were required to spend some time on a MTB. i think it would reduce crashes.

tetonrider

andy STi's so old and slow that he won cascade and his bad-ass 'cross series.

don't believe his reverse-hype!!

globecanvas

I completely agree with this, though my observations are from riding cross bikes on rough terrain. A friend and I have an ongoing conversation about it. We think it's partly because riding on challenging terrain requires frequent anaerobic efforts that your power meter doesn't record, either because they are too short (like a quarter of a pedal stroke) or are not entirely output to the pedals (upper body or core efforts). And partly because you need to expend physical effort simply absorbing vibration energy.

We go back and forth on which effect is more important. I personally think the vibration issue is significant. The bike moves far more than your body does, obviously (or else your teeth would rattle out in ten minutes), that represents energy that you are counteracting with your own physical energy in order to dampen it.

Another observation is that the gap between perceived effort and power output is much wider at the start of the cross season than the end. (We have a game of trying to guess NP from perceived effort at the end of the ride.) Whatever the actual source of unrecorded energy loss is, specific training does reduce it.

I won't start into the epistemological question of whether the gap between perceived effort and power output actually means the workout is inferior in terms of creating training load...

tetonrider

wheels also slip, either at a macro or micro level. this can add up in terms of perceived exertion, but they can be recorded as no/low power.

it's not too philosophical. it's not that it is inferior nor superior -- just different. if one's goal is to get better at riding 340 watts on the road, riding at 300W on the MTB (even if if feels like 340 or 400) just doesn't induce the same adaptation. i guess it just depends on how specific one wants to get with their goals and training.

used to be that top MTBers trained a great deal on the road, on a road bike as it was a way to get more consistency. there's been a shift amongst many to still train on the road but do so on 29ers -- allowing for consistency of the terrain but specificity of the position on the bike.

topflightpro

A few years ago, a buddy of mine switched from racing on the road to racing on the mtb. And he specifically was focused on 100-mile and 24-hour races. He spent 80 percent of his time training on the road, largely because he needed to keep the volume up.

And I've known a lot of mountain bikers who've had road rims on disc mtn hubs so they can get the volume in on the road on their mountain bike.

waterrockets 

I haven't trained with power off road, so these observations are interesting. I do think the pulling over water bars and such will be energy spent by your arms, but not recorded. Wheel slips seem like they should come out in the wash, but the rhythm disruption of a major slip is going to have a bigger impact on performance than it will on recorded power.

Still, it seems to me that you'd be training a 340W VO2Max at 300W if your RPE was similar. Your heart and lungs are doing the same things. You might not get full credit in the resulting power file though.

All this said, the year I got my 5' power up over 6.2W/kg (measured on the road), I was indeed doing repeats off road a couple times/month (so ~half my repeats workouts). Then again, that could have been due to lots of things, but it's clear that the MTB stuff wasn't really holding me back.

I guess that I'm saying a 5' hard effort pedaling a bicycle is should still generally train VO2Max.

Debusama

He said he was also racing Walla Walla. I was just wondering if he would be in the same pack as me.

Debusama

Bend seems to have and extremely high cyclist to population ratio. I did the HC100 there a few years ago and was impressed by how many of the racers were locals… also impressed by how comparatively slow they made me feel. I look forward to getting beat by your friends.

Ygduf

I do mountain repeats on a hill bike.