The perfect 60 km: designing a mid-week loop you'll ride all year

Most riders have a route they ride more than any other. It is the one they do on a Wednesday evening after work, or a Tuesday morning before it, and over a year it accounts for more of their training than any camp or sportive. It is almost never designed. It was the loop that happened when they first started riding, extended a bit, and it has one junction that always loses two minutes and a climb in the wrong place.

This is the case for designing that loop on purpose, and a method for doing it: roughly 60 km, two hours, ridden fifty times a year.

Why 60 km

Sixty kilometres is about two hours for most riders, and two hours is the length of session that a working week can absorb without argument. It is long enough to hold a proper block of steady work with a warm-up either side, and short enough that you can do it before breakfast in summer or in the last of the light in September. The WHO's 2020 guidelines put the adult target at 150–300 minutes of moderate or 75–150 of vigorous activity a week; one 60 km loop and a weekend ride clears that on their own, which is a useful floor to have in a bad month.

It also fits the shape of a training week. Seiler's review of how elite endurance athletes distribute intensity found roughly 80% of sessions at low intensity and about 20% dominated by hard work, and that two hard sessions a week were enough to drive adaptation. Stöggl and Sperlich's nine-week trial in trained endurance athletes found that a polarised distribution improved key endurance measures more than threshold-heavy or high-intensity-only alternatives. A mid-week loop is where one of those two hard sessions lives, or where one of the many easy ones does, and the same road has to serve both.

What the loop needs

Design it around five things. Everything else is scenery.

• One climb, in the second third. Long enough for a threshold interval: eight to fifteen minutes at your pace, which for most people is 3–6 km at 5–7%. It goes after 20–25 km so you are warm and before the last 15 so you can recover on the way home. If your area has no such climb, the next item does its job.
• One uninterrupted stretch of 15–20 minutes. No junctions, no villages, no descents. This is where the sweet-spot or tempo block goes on the days that are not climbing days, and where you ride steadily at Zone 2 on the days that are. It is the single most valuable feature of a training loop and the one most loops lack.
• As few stops as possible. Broach and colleagues' GPS study of where cyclists choose to ride found riders sensitive to the number of turns and to how intersections are controlled, over and above distance and slope. That is not only about pleasantness; every stop is a broken interval. Trade a longer route for a smoother one.
• Quiet roads at the hour you ride. A road that is empty at 06:30 may not be at 18:00. Ride the loop once at your actual time before you commit to it. Road choice is a safety decision first.
• A loop, not an out-and-back. Wind and gradient balance out over a circuit; on an out-and-back you carry the headwind home. The full argument is here.

Direction and shape

Ride it the same way round every time. The reason is comparison: the same loop at the same time on the same day is the closest thing an amateur has to a laboratory, and if your two-hour power or your average speed on the steady section moves, you want the change to be you and not the direction. Once a season, ride it backwards on purpose; the reverse of a familiar route is a genuinely different ride and a good way to check the loop still makes sense.

Shape matters too. A figure-of-eight that passes near home at halfway gives you a bail-out in bad weather and an easy way to cut the ride to 40 km on a heavy-legs day, without changing the good parts. A pure circle is prettier and less useful.

All-year design

The loop you ride in January is not the loop you ride in June, but it should be the same road. Things that change with season and how to design for them:

• Light. In winter the loop is ridden in the dark at one or both ends. The quiet lane with no street lights and a bad surface is fine in July and unpleasant in December. Design the first and last 10 km for winter: lit where possible, good surface, wide enough for a car to pass. Winter route design covers this in detail.
• Surface. A road that floods, or that a farm uses in autumn, is not a mid-week road. You are going to ride it fifty times; you will meet the mud.
• Wind. Learn the prevailing direction and put the exposed section into it on the way out, so you come home with it behind you.
• Escape. Know the shortcut from every point on the loop. In summer you will never use it. In February you will.

Why the same loop, and not variety

Variety is good for long weekend rides and bad for mid-week ones, for a practical reason: the mid-week ride is the one that gets skipped, and the thing that stops it being skipped is that it requires no decisions. Lally and colleagues' study of habit formation in the real world followed 96 people doing a chosen daily behaviour in a fixed context for twelve weeks; automaticity built with repetition in a stable context, took a median of about two months to plateau, and varied from 18 to 254 days between people. The fixed context is the point. If the loop is always the same, the ride on Wednesday is not a plan, it is what Wednesday is.

The other advantage is measurement. Three years of the same loop is a record of your fitness better than any test, because it is unrehearsed. The climb time in March against the climb time last March tells you what the winter did. A training diary makes this easier; a matched route in your calendar makes it automatic.

Using it in a plan

In Moveee, a training plan puts a mid-week session on the day you pick, and the Route Engine can match a saved route to what the session asks for: if Wednesday is a threshold day it will pick the loop with the climb, and if it is an endurance day it will pick the flatter one. The point of designing your 60 km properly is that it becomes the route the engine reaches for most, and the one whose numbers you can trust. Build it in the Route Builder, look at the profile, and if the weather takes the day away, the same saved loop can be ridden indoors on a smart trainer with the same climb in the same place.

Draw it this week. Ride it three times. Then fix the junction you have been putting up with for two years.