Training for Mallorca 312 (2019) – Driven by Fear!

Signing Up

My first blog post is triggered by the recent 2 year anniversary of attempting to ride Mallorca 312 in April 2019, It all started several months before in September 2018 when my self and 7 other friends signed up for this amazing event! There was a certain amount of nervousness as I completed the online application to ride, this was to be the longest and hilliest ride I had ever undertaken…

So, signup all completed, I now had a very real fear that would drive my training over the next six months until the event!

A Plan For Mallorca 312 Training

At this point in time I had only been riding for 2 years, after spending way too much time sat in an office chair and being a general couch potato. I knew I needed a plan to increase my cycling strength and endurance if I was ever to complete the Mallorca 312 ride, and so a plan was hatched…

Stage 1 was to do as much targeted turbo trainer work as possible to raise my FTP. Stage 2 was to steadily increase my outdoor ride distance and time to something approaching the event length of 312 KM.

Increasing FTP Through Turbo Training

The first goal was to improve my FTP as much as possible, therefore increasing the speed at which I could comfortably ride the whole event. I needed a benchmark to set the difficulty of the coming weeks of workout and so did a FTP test at the beginning of October 2018, the result was 217 watts which I was fairly pleased with! I set a target in my head of 250 watts before the event at the end of April, now onto the turbo training!

Zwift was my online training platform of choice at the time so I looked through their training plans and workouts, one in particular stood out to me, the 4 Week FTP Booster. I liked the look of this plan, the name was exactly what I was after! In general, you ride 6 days a week (I took the zone 2 ride as a rest day) for no longer than around an hour. It quite nicely became part of my evening routine.

Training Block 1

A month went by and the final week of the plan came around, this included a FTP test. A very pleasant surprised was seeing that my FTP was now 232 watts! A nice increase of 15 watts, around 7%.

Training Block 2

I took a few weeks break from the turbo plan and started the same 4 Week FTP Booster again at the start of December. It was difficult to fit in some outdoor rides, as well as Christmas, of course, so I didn’t complete the 4 weeks of workouts until nearly the end of January 2019. Again, the plan includes a FTP test in the 4th week, this time with a pleasing result of 247 watts! This was another increase of 15 watts, around 6-7%. I was now only 3 watts away from the goal I’d plucked out of thin air back in October.

Training Block 3

I started the same 4 Week FTP Booster plan again at the start of February. This time not completing it until mid-March with the outdoor rides I was trying to fit in. The result of the test this time was 257 watts, another 10 watts added, around 4%. I’d finally cleared my goal of 250 watts!

Increasing Endurance Through Longer Outdoor Rides

The second goal of my training was to improve endurance through progressively longer rides. Fortunately, with a group of 8 of us all entering the event, there were always some friendly faces to ride with that help the miles and hours fly by!

I had a rough plan to do an increasingly longer ride on every other weekend, with at least one 100KM ride on the weekends in between. Trying to plan routes that included as much climbing as possible was also important. This is how it worked out:

19th January – 125 miles, 8300 ft
26th January – 63 miles, 3400 ft
2nd February – 113 miles, 7100 ft
10th February – 100 miles, 6200 ft
16th February – 139 miles, 8300 ft
23rd February – 57 miles, 3800 ft
2nd March – 100 miles, 4700 ft
9th March – 140 miles, 8900 ft
17th March – 73 miles, 4400 ft
23rd March – 100 miles, 5700 ft
24th March – 60 miles, 3200 ft
30th March – 160 miles, 9000 ft

and finally, the Shark Audax, 7th April – 115 miles, 10200 ft

That was my training done. There were a few other smaller rides over the rest of April until we flew out to Mallorca for the Mallorca 312 event. I felt good that I had increased my FTP by a decent amount and had also improved my endurance. I felt as confident as I possibly could that I would be able to finish the event…

Next, our first day in Mallorca, a ride to the lighthouse at Cap de Formentor