Training Advice

You might say there are two basic schools of thought - ancient and modern.
Modern:
In a nutshell this is the Peter Keen/Chris Boardman approach. It involves lots of measuring, gym work, turbos etc. It works (see olympic results). However, it is expensive and doesn't sound much fun.
Ancient:
Just do lots of miles. Then do some more: every mile pays a dividend.
Historically far more races have been won with the old method than the modern technique, but this may not always be true in the future. However, I hope the reason anyone reads this forum is because they actually like riding their bikes, and this seems to fit in better with the traditional way of doing things.
Just a few suggestions to help with all those miles.

• Join a club. If you find one that suits you it will change your life.
  
• Be flexible about the discipline you want to take part in. Track has been on the TV a lot recently, but its not suitable for all. If climbing is your strongest suit you won't be able to show it off on the velodrome. Everyone should aim to do some road racing, but if you can only measure improvement by going from DNF to FMB, you won't find it very encouraging. For this reason I suggest everyone should do some time trialling. Virtually all the big names in British cyclesport,from Leon Meredith to Boardman himself have had an involvement with time trialling; the improvement in your personal bests give you something concrete to put in your training diary (you'llneed one of those).
  -I'd say for most people 5000 miles per year would be a absolute minimum for racing fitness.
  That's quite enough for one post.
  
  

Sorry lot of mis-information in here, what is expensive and not fun about about training intelligently!? More varied training is far more mentally stimulating than doing the same long rides all the time!!!

Boardman and Keen are not the only ones with a modern approach as you call it and in fact you are way behind the times as neither of these guys have any coaching involvement in the current gb set up and haven’t for some time.

As for doing lots of miles once you have gone past a certain base level of fitness necessary to allow you to actually train properly, lots of miles going slowly is only going to train you to be able to do lots of miles going you guessed it, slowly.....

Specificity is the key, the person who will win, will be the person on the whole who has the most speed relative to the distance of the event, be that a 100 mile road race or a one lap sprint.

Train to be fast, as I mentioned earlier you need a certain level of fitness to be able to train hard, what was commonly known as base miles (although for track sprinters your base actually mainly comes from the gym) seem to for most people to cover the entire off season, then they try and actually get fast during the racing season, when they are tired from racing! Not ideal

Instead have a fairly short road block say 4-6 weeks followed by concentrating on speed development and power development, examples being riding distances shorter than race distance at a higher than race pace to improve your speed, some times with large rest periods to allow full recovery other times with short rest to improve your ability to recover(these short recovery sessions do a huge amount for aerobic ability too) while still keeping some longer rides in also, sometimes as recovery where you go at a 2/10 pace other times more tempo which might be 6-7/10 pace

From time to time stick in another road block to keep the aerobic fitness, however these can be shorter than the main off season one.

Oh and apart from the sprinters most top enduro riders don’t do gym, they do their strength work on the bike with over gear efforts, however I would certainly do a couple of core sessions a week off season and one a week in season to maintain.

As for saying a certain mileage a rider needs to do to achieve race fitness once again rubbish, everyone is different and responds to training differently, however most riders will gain endurance fitness easier than they will speed, so weight your training accordingly, studies have shown that for most once you go over 90mins in a ride you are just training muscular endurance and not improving aerobic fitness(your body’s ability to use oxygen as a fuel) so there isn’t much need to do that many rides over 90mins unless your racing will last longer than this.

Also apart from time trials most races end in a sprint!! don’t neglect this in your training, contrary to what most people think sprint training isn’t just doing short efforts(short being 30s or less-ideally around 10s), it is doing short efforts with complete or near complete rest, any shorter and you wont be able to complete each effort with the intensity necessary to improve, for most people we are talking 15mins plus between sprints, also once your performance starts to drop finish a sprint session, you wont be improving and you will just tire yourself more than is necessary for the next training session.

Oh and the reason more races have been won on the old method is because they didn’t know better! As soon as riders did they trained more intelligently and went faster, that is why racing is getting faster! Do you think the racers of today would use the methods their say 1950's and 60's counterparts used now just because it worked then?! I don’t! and if they did they would lose plain and simple.