My resume is pretty short when it comes to endurance events. There was that 23-hour nonstop drive from New Hampshire to South Carolina back in 1987, and I vaguely remember a St. Patrick's Day drinking contest at the University of Maryland that lasted quite a while (thanks, Norman).

And I'll resist the marriage jokes (21 years, and more to come).

The point is I was skittish when Butch Counts, a former bike racer and coach who rides regularly with the Potomac Pedalers Touring Club, invited me to begin training for the Cannonball Century in Fredericksburg, Va. At that point, the event was seven weeks away, and while I'd been riding pretty regularly during the summer, I had no real sense of what it would take to prepare for and ride 100 miles at a clip.

But when Counts laid out the training schedule, it not only seemed doable, it rang a bell. If the aim is to finish an endurance event, it turns out the tactics novices can use are an extension of what might be considered "best practices" for a more general workout schedule. The goals, times and intensities are more aggressive, but the underlying strategy boils down to the same stuff:

Do one long workout one day a week. Do a hard but shorter one on another. Stay in the middle otherwise, and schedule enough rest.

In preparing for our ride, Counts laid out a three-day-a-week plan. We'd ride long on the weekends, pushing the time progressively closer to the seven or eight hours we expect to do during the event; do a modestly paced two-hour ride during the week; and do a third, hard ride aimed at keeping the heart rate in its upper zones for an hour or so.

In talking with friends who run the occasional marathon, that's roughly what they do to prepare — one long run each week that may be as little as 10 miles, with the distance increasing steadily as a race approaches, and two or three shorter runs, with one that includes a faster pace or speed intervals to boost the heart rate.

It also is, in essence, the general fitness plan laid out when I purchased a Polar heart rate monitor last spring and plugged my weight and age and other variables into its training software. The monitor and companion Web site spit out a weekly plan for the length and intensity of each workout — in my case calling for a modestly paced 80-minute session each week that keeps the heart rate around 60 to 70 percent of its maximum, a 45-minute one that pushes it to between 80 percent and 90 percent, and three sessions of around 50 minutes that keep the heart rate in between.

Following that approach for a few months, I have felt the progress. The 5-mph pace that was painful on the treadmill several months ago, I can now maintain for an hour and a half; as for speed, I am up to about 6.6 mph before the heart rate climbs too high.

Why does it work? When it comes to endurance, there are two big traffic cops: our ability to produce the steady flow of energy needed to maintain a modest aerobic pace, and the lactate threshold, the point at which lactic acid starts to accumulate as a byproduct of heavy exertion.

"Long slow distance" workouts attack the first problem by making the body more efficient, increasing the flow of blood through the heart and capillaries, increasing the number of mitochondria in our cells, and making them better at their job of producing energy. Intensity workouts and speed intervals move the lactate barrier a bit further off, training the heart to work harder and providing the push needed to tackle hills or go faster.

"If you do enough of that, the body will adapt," said Marcelo Aller, athletic manager for Polar. "It will become more efficient. The central nervous system adapts and the cells adapt."

There are two other parts of the training that aren't as familiar, with which I continue to experiment.

First: food. An event this long requires you to eat while you're under way. The body relies on a combination of stored fat and stored glycogen to produce energy. While there is no shortage of fat, in my case, to sustain that process, the glycogen will peter out after perhaps 60 to 90 minutes, said Jo B. Zimmerman, a trainer and doctoral student at the University of Maryland's Department of Kinesiology.

Which is where the sports drinks, energy bars, fruit and candy come into play — anything that is packed with carbohydrates and easy to digest.

"You have to eat while you're on the bike and you have to train the digestive system," Zimmerman said, because some people find that eating while in motion upsets their stomach. As a starter she recommended light fruits — frozen grapes, for example. Eating has never bothered me, to say the least, so that shouldn't be a problem, and the prospect of a couple of guilt-free Snickers and Clif Bars is motivation in and of itself.

Lastly, time at task: It may take eight hours to finish the 100-mile job, and spending that long hunched over the handlebars isn't, Counts assured me, something to relish.

In the end, the only way to prepare is to get on the bike and pedal. If you've been waiting for the chance to begin working out, this is it.