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No 30/30 intervals. No threshold sets. No sign sprints. Not even a carefully planned session on the bike computer. In the summer, many cyclists just want to hop on their bikes, set out to explore new routes, and come back a few hours later. Good news: this isn’t necessarily a waste of time. As long as you understand what you’re building, vacation can even become one of the best times of the year to rebuild your endurance.
By Jeff Tatard – Photos: DR
Cycling Before Training
There’s something rather strange about the modern cyclist. By constantly measuring their watts, heart rate, heart rate variability, training load, and probably soon even the speed at which they open the garage door, they’ve come to believe that a ride without a specific workout plan is a pointless ride. As if setting out for three hours simply because a small road looks pretty were now a mistake in a training plan.
Yet vacation may be the best time to put things back in the right order. Grab your bike. Set off. Ride. Turn left because the road looks inviting rather than right because the GPX file demands it. Climb a pass without constantly checking your watts. Stop for a coffee. Then set off again. And, almost without realizing it, get in some endurance training.
Endurance training isn’t a workout
This is probably the first misconception to clear up. Endurance training isn’t an exercise. It’s a process. And contrary to what our current fascination with highly structured workouts might suggest, this process relies largely on something incredibly simple: accumulating time at low or moderate intensity.
When you ride for a long time at a controlled intensity, your body gradually learns to become more efficient. Endurance-related adaptations involve, in particular, the mitochondria, muscle capillarization, the use of energy substrates, and the ability to sustain effort over a long period while limiting its physiological cost. In other words, while you may feel like you’re simply taking a leisurely ride along a road in Portugal, Brittany, or Provence, your body isn’t necessarily taking a break.
No need to turn every hill into an FTP test
Of course, “riding at a relaxed pace” doesn’t necessarily mean spending four hours watching the flowers grow along the roadside. The terrain naturally varies the intensity. A hill sometimes forces you to push harder. A descent lets you recover. The wind changes the effort. A twenty-minute climb can spontaneously take you to tempo intensity. And that’s okay.
It’s probably even one of the joys of these summer rides: letting the terrain organize part of your training for you. It’s not essential to turn every hill into a 4 × 8-minute interval at 105% of FTP for it to provide a training stimulus. Climbing steadily, without pushing yourself into the red zone, and then continuing to ride for several hours is already a particularly effective workout.
The trap is actually the opposite: turning every vacation ride into an invisible race against yourself, your friends, or Strava. Because base training requires something that ambitious cyclists sometimes find very hard to accept: patience.
What matters is also what happens after three hours
A 1.5-hour ride and a 4-hour ride don’t tell exactly the same physiological story. As the ride progresses, muscle fatigue sets in, energy reserves dwindle, and the need to keep fueling and hydrating properly becomes essential—but so does that crucial ability in long rides: maintaining a solid effort even when your body is no longer fully fresh.
That’s when long rides take on a whole new dimension. You may not have done any interval training, but you’ve learned to pedal through the third hour. Then the fourth. To eat before you get hungry. To drink before you’re thirsty. To find a comfortable position. To stay efficient when your legs slowly start to lose their freshness. For anyone training for a cyclosportive, a Gran Fondo, or a long gravel race, this is certainly no small matter.
Vacations allow you to do what the rest of the year doesn’t
Finally, there’s one variable that no power meter talks about enough: available time. The rest of the year, you have to squeeze in cycling between work, the kids, appointments, and daily obligations. An hour and a half then becomes precious, and structuring that time wisely obviously makes sense. But on vacation, something changes: sometimes you have three, four, or five hours at your disposal without having to check your watch every twenty minutes.
Why feel compelled to fill that time with workouts? Taking advantage of this free time to gradually increase your training volume, discover new routes, and rack up hours at a reasonable intensity can be a real endurance booster. Provided, of course, that you respect your recovery time and don’t suddenly triple your training volume just because the hotel serves breakfast until 10 a.m.
Riding for fun isn’t the enemy of performance
This may ultimately be the most important message. We’ve rationalized training to such an extent that we’ve sometimes created an artificial dichotomy between enjoyment and performance. Yet some of the most fundamental adaptations in cycling are built precisely by doing what many of us started this sport for: riding for long periods.
So this summer, you can, of course, schedule your intervals, monitor your FTP, and conscientiously stick to your plan. But you can also set all that aside for a few days. Grab your bike. Fill your water bottles. Stuff a few energy bars in your pockets. Pick a direction and set off for three or four hours to discover what lies beyond the next hill. You might feel like you’ve just gone for a leisurely ride. Your body, however, will know full well that you’ve been training.
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