So. Now that it’s mid-January, Brevet week is suddenly in 4 months. Yikes. I’m planning to ride roughly 900 miles that week, so I’m feeling like now is the time to really build some volume.

Problem is, I’m not entirely sure how to do it. I’ve read everything I can find about training for long rides—that usually means a cross-state tour, a double century, or at most a 600k brevet. Brevet week consists of 4 of these monster rides, back-to-back.

I’ve spent a lot of time sitting on my bed with a calendar and a pencil, scheduling long rides of peculiar distances like 167 miles, based on various peculiar theories of percentages or ratios. I’ve agonized over my palm pilot, trying to figure out how to ride 12 hours on a day when I have to do carpool at 2:45, Tae Kwon Do at 4:15, and tap at 6.

In marathon training, you run several days a week, including some intervals, a tempo run, and at least one long run. Debate rages over the optimal distance for the longest long run, and as far as I can tell, the distance that works best for a given person is a function of that person’s goal for the race—if you’re trying to win, you probably ought to go over-distance, maybe up to 28 or 30 miles. But if you’re just trying to finish before they tear down the finish line, you don’t need to go more than 22 in training, and as little as 20 might be fine.

But I’m not sure how to translate that formula to an event of this magnitude. Obviously, overdistance isn’t an option. So what do I do? In 2003, I trained up to nearly the distance of the first brevet (I did my first century ride a few weeks before the 200k), and then considered each brevet to be a build-up to the next distance. That worked reasonably well until I tried to make the jump from 600k to 1200k (although that was more than just a failure of training—it was a complete systems melt-down). Plus, I had two or three weeks to recover between each brevet; this year I’ll have, at most, 36 hours between rides.

I tend to think in absolutes, so what I want to know is how long my longest training ride needs to be, and then I’ll work backwards from there. A century doesn’t seem like enough, but distances much greater than that seem, in my head, insurmountable as solo training rides. I could ride some early season brevets in other states (including some of our local ones), but that bothers me—won’t I feel less committed to the Wisconsin rides if I’ve already done, say, a 200k and a 300k?

I’m leaning toward maxxing out at about 200k, but perhaps trying to do some serious back-to-back distance—maybe 5 centuries in a row? Ugh. I get tired just thinking about that, and the scheduling will be a nightmare. Then there’s the question of how many long days per week? How many intervals are enough? What exactly IS tempo for something like this, anyway? And how many days off are too many??!

Anyway, I know in my heart that what I really need to do is ride the bike. Sitting on the bed with pencil and paper is not making my butt any tougher!