Unscripted

You remember the first time you rode all day.

Not just a long ride. All day. The one where you were eating before you were hungry, on roads past the fringe of your usual routes. Somewhere around hour five the world went quiet and you found out what your legs actually had. You came home tired but not broken, and the next time you started a long ride, you started it a little more confidently.

No training plan gave you that. The ride did.

Most cyclists carry a short list of efforts like this in the back of their mind. They aren’t assigned by a coach or tied to a race. They’re just waiting for the right day and a simple question: have I done this yet?

Call it the bucket list workout.

What separates it from a structured session is uncertainty. A planned interval workout tells you how the ride will end before you clip in. A bucket list effort doesn’t. It poses an open-ended question and lets the ride answer. What comes back from these rides becomes a reference point you’ll use for years: in races, in training blocks, and in the moments when you need to know what you’ve got.

With the race calendar thinning out, now’s a good time to look at that list. A few to get you started:

The 20-minute all-out. Most riders have an FTP number in their app. Fewer have ridden as hard as they can for twenty minutes and sat with what came back. There’s no grey zone in a real maximal effort. It teaches full commitment, honesty, and what “hard” feels like from the inside.

Two hours of real Zone 2. Heart rate locked in, ego locked out. No nudging the pace on the rollers, or coasting downhill. Most riders find out their “easy” has been lying to them for years. It teaches patience, focus, and control.

The all-day ride. However long “all day” means for you. Seek out new roads or trails and range into unknown territory. It brings a sense of adventure, and teaches fueling, perseverance, and unscripted self-sufficiency.

The nastiest climb around. You know the one. It’s steep, or endless, or some combination of the two. It teaches that anticipation is almost always worse than the climb, and that fear responds to preparation, mental and physical.

Thirty-nine. Three sets of 13 x 30 seconds hard, 15 easy. Short enough to commit to fully, brutal enough to remember. It teaches that the hard intervals are survivable, and discomfort is temporary.

That’s a starter list. The best one on your list is the one you’ve been putting off.

You already know which one it is.

See you next week,
Steve