Ah, the infamous century ride. Often considered a right of passage for cyclists, a century ride is 100 miles of just you and your bike getting from point A to point B, enjoying every mile in between. Sounds simple, right?
Get Bicycling’s Guide to How to Master the Century
The truth is, riding 100 miles can seem daunting at first, maybe even a little intimidating, especially if it’s your first one. There are a lot of practical considerations for riding for that long, such as how to fuel properly and hydrate correctly and how to get your bike dialed to stay comfortable, so you physically feel your best while taking on such a challenge.
Despite the initial learning curve that tackling a century can entail, once you start riding regularly, you’ll realize conquering 100 miles in one ride is not only totally doable, but an extremely motivating goal to work toward. Of course, dreaming, planning, and actually finishing a 100-mile ride requires dedicated training.
Enter: This century training plan, which requires just three rides a week, making it perfect for anyone with a busy schedule (a.k.a. everyone?). Here are all the details you need to be ready to ride a century in just eight weeks.
Your Century Training Plan Workouts
This eight-week plan includes three rides a week: one long ride, one steady ride, and one speedy ride. However, because there are just three rides a week in this plan, they need to be both efficient and effective.
To make the most of each training ride in this plan, we have tips on how to tackle each workout to maximize the benefits. Plus, we have strategies for you for making your 100-mile ride a sweet success.
Long Ride: The Meat
During your first week of this century training plan, you will ride 1.5 to 2 hours, or about 20 miles, and build from there. The long ride is all about building up your time in the saddle.
If you’re already comfortable with a longer ride than week one prescribes, start with 2.5 to 3 hours and follow the same guidelines for mileage building, topping off at about 85 miles.
How to do it:
Do your long rides at a steady, but not taxing, pace—about 60 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate or 56 to 75 percent of your functional threshold power (FTP), also known as zone 2. Aim to keep the speed steady during the entire effort.
Using a heart rate monitor or power meter would be ideal to make sure you stay within zone 2. If you’ve been working on your zone 2 training before starting this plan, this kind of long steady distance ride will be familiar to you.
Steady Ride: The Bread and Butter
In this plan, your steady rides entail two to four longer, harder efforts of 15 to 30 minutes in length, followed by 15 minutes of easy pedaling in between. During the harder efforts you’ll want to feel like you’re pedaling with someone slightly faster than you, while the easier efforts are all about teaching your body to recover on the bike.
These rides are designed to increase your endurance and will train your body to ride briskly while maintaining comfort. They’ll also increase your cardiovascular stamina, as you’re recovering in between the harder efforts. What all of this translates to is you finishing 100 miles faster and fresher!
How to do it:
Warm up with easy spinning for 15 minutes.
Increase your pace and shift into a harder gear, maintaining this higher level of effort for 15 to 30 minutes. These harder efforts should increase your breathing and elevate your heart rate to around 70 to 80 percent of your maximum heart rate or 76 and 90 percent of your FTP, also known as zone 3.
Pedal easily for 15 minutes between harder efforts, allowing your heart rate to come down and your body to recover. Repeat this sequence two to four times.
Finish up with an easy cooldown.
Speed Ride: The Secret Sauce
Cyclists training for distance will sometimes skimp on speedwork—or skip it altogether—because they think they need volume, not intensity, to go long.
But riding at a fast tempo and adding interval training to the mix improves your endurance by raising your lactate threshold—the point at which your muscles scream “slow down!”—and over time this will raise the ceiling of that threshold. When you raise this ceiling, you can ride faster and farther before your body hits the brakes and fatigue sets in.
HIIT (high intensity interval training) also improves your cardiovascular health, and can be simple to incorporate into your regular training, even for beginners.
How to do it:
Warm up with easy spinning for 10 minutes, then aim to do four to six very hard or max-effort intervals ranging from 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
In between, spin easy for twice the length of the interval. Do these on a challenging stretch of road, such as a hill or into a headwind, during the suggested ride lengths listed on your century training plan. If those kinds of riding conditions aren’t available out on the road, you can do your intervals on an indoor trainer or rollers.
Make sure to cool down with easy riding for about 10 minutes at the end of this ride, too.
8-Week Century Training Plan
4 Tips for Crushing Your Century Ride
1. Dial In Your Fueling
Eat a carbohydrate-rich breakfast of 400 to 500 calories two to three hours before the event, which will allow your body enough time to digest your meal. This could look like a slice of whole-wheat toast with peanut butter and a banana, or a homemade smoothie.
Make sure you are well hydrated, not only before your century but also in the days leading up to your hundo.
During your century ride, aim to drink one bottle of electrolyte mix and to eat 200 to 300 calories every hour, with the combination of the two containing 30 to 60 grams of carbs total.
2. Pedal at Your Pace
One mistake it’s easy to make when riding your first century is getting excited and letting yourself be seduced into speeding along with faster riders early in the day, only to push yourself too hard, too soon and cracking somewhere in the middle of the ride.
Learning how to pace your effort is an important skill to get comfortable with, and an important part of that is resisting the temptation to go out too fast or too hard at the start of your ride. Think of the first 30 to 60 minutes of your ride as your warm up, and pedal at an easy, conversational pace.
After that, aim to stay within zones 1 or 2 for the remainder of your century to make sure you don’t run out of steam before you get to the finish. Once you figure out the pace that will keep your heart rate within zones 1 or 2, fall in with riders who are pedaling at your pace.
3. Move Around on the Bike
You can relieve aches and pains in your neck and back or avoid them altogether by moving around on your bike periodically. Try changing your hand position often and standing out of the saddle to stretch.
Use stop signs, intersections, or breaks as an opportunity to stretch out by doing a few quick mobility moves. Because cycling keeps our bodies in a relatively fixed position, adding some movement to counteract that can make a bike difference in your performance and how your body feels at the end of the ride.
4. Keep Breaks Short
When you’re on a long ride, take advantage of breaks or rest stops to use the bathroom, refill bottles, stretch and grab some food.
But, as tempting as it may be, don’t linger off the bike for too long. A stop that lasts more than 10 to 15 minutes will cause your legs to stiffen and make it harder to get going again. Instead, use the break to refresh your body, reapply sunscreen, and then get back on the road.
Natascha Grief is Bicycling’s Health & Fitness Editor. She started in the cycling industry as a bike mechanic a couple of decades ago, earning a couple pro-mechanic certifications and her USA Cycling Race Mechanic license. She went on to apprentice for framebuilder Brent Steelman in her hometown of Redwood City, California before spending several years working for both large and not-so-large cycling brands. She then switched gears and industries to earn multiple personal training certifications while honing her skills as a trainer and coach, specializing in functional training, corrective exercise, and body positive personal training. She began contributing regularly to Runner’s World and Bicycling as a freelance writer in 2020, and joined the editorial staff of Bicycling in 2022.
