FlashBazbo

Background: I'm 58 years old and my strength is TT cycling efforts -- long, steady, lactate threshold races. My racing "season" of late has worked pretty well for two peaks -- one in late May / early June and the other in late August / early September. Historically, I've trained year 'round and my total mileage has been between 8,000 and 10,000 miles per year. I've used a traditional training plan -- massive amounts of base, but my peak (1s, 1m) power levels are nothing to be proud of.

I would like to reduce the amount of time I spend on the bike, but I don't want to stop being competitive in TT's / triathlons where the bike race is around 1 hour in duration. (I still compete pretty well with the overall / young guys, but those days are numbered.)

Is the "Time Crunched Cycling" training plan effective in doing what I want to do? Switching over will almost certainly cost me some aerobic fitness -- maybe permanently. But will it keep me competitive in TT races of about 1 hour? Has anyone here used the Time Crunched method? How old are you? How did it go?

Thanks for your input!

tourisme

All I can tell you is my experience with the TCTP. I was in my fifties, racing, but had lost a winter's training through injury and embarked on Carmichael's plan to get fit quick.

It worked, in that in about eight weeks I got sufficient top-end fitness to be competitive in crits. But it was unsustainable, after a couple more weeks I had to back off because I was burning out, becoming exhausted, unable to hit the numbers in training sessions.

Your situation is different in two respects. You have a massive base, while mine was badly depleted through a three-month absence. And you're a time-triallist, which I wasn't. However, if you want my opinion I'd say the time-crunched plan is completely unsuitable for what you want, in that is focusses wholly on intensity. It sounds as if you're spending around 10 hours a week on the bike. My recommendation would be simply to cut out four hours of endurance training and replace it with a one-hour HIIT session. That should enable you to maintain a decent level of aerobic capacity while improving the top end a bit. By all means use some of Carmichael's protocols for the HIIT sessions, but I really wouldn't use his whole program, you'd lose too much.

fstrnu

One hour efforts are perfect for time crunched. Most of the challenges are with substituting intensity for longer events. For one hour, you'll still be training for the full duration of your event so yeah dude.

Carbonfiberboy 

The trad wisdom is that beyond 10 hrs./week, the results of more time are small percentage increases. I don't have the numbers, I think they're personal. So it comes down to - how badly do you want that part? My advice is to PM @Heathpack. She does TT, she's not a child, and she's had very good results.

IIRC, she's done a mix of hard and very hard efforts, a good bit of high-cadence recovery, not that much base (I think). There are many good tools available to avoid burnout - morning resting and standing HRs, HRV, and CTL numbers in TrainingPeaks. I use all of those. Whatever training plan you use, it has be modified or based on your recovery ability, simple as that. A base-heavy plan doesn't seem optimal for your goals.