Originally Posted by
GhostRider62
You're asking opinions and they will vary.
In your circumstance with a high pressure job and an early morning Saturday start on a very difficult event for which you are maybe just sufficiently fit, I would NOT do a ride at all on Friday evening. Spend the time making sure you have everything ready and relax.
So, I am twice your age or so. Last Saturday, I did 300km with 12,800 feet per my Garmin. I did nothing thurs and friday. My CTL dropped a bit to 66.1 and my TSB was positive 7 on Saturday. On Wednesday, I did a warm up and one pretty hard 15 minute hill climb at 317 watts ave., turn around and went home. Normally, I would prefer to have a higher CTL but I had had some bad injuries and a late start this year.
Did I make a mistake? Or do I just know my body? I hit 177 PB or tied for PB on the route. I took 1 hour and 6 minutes off my previous best time. So, the two rest days did not hurt me. I took the rest because the course was difficult and I wanted sort of fresh legs. You are much younger and might be able to train all week as directed by Coach. In my case, this ride was not an important ride but given my modest endurance level, it made sense for me to take 2 zeros leading into a long hard ride that I had to wake up at 3 am to get to.
When I do those really early starts, i move my bed and waking times an hour/day over as many days as necessary so that on event day, I have had my normal sleep the night before.
My personal experience is that doing openers the day before makes me faster for the first few hours, then not so much, maybe slower thereafter. I usually take 2 days off before a big event. Whether or not a century counts as such is probably a function of training state.