Yeah for me personally if I do a ride higher than .7 IF in between interval days my next interval workout is going to suffer. And I always eat at least 60g of carbs per hour even for 1 hour rides. But I have started pushing the IF on my long weekend rides rather than trying to keep it strictly in zone 2 and I think that has been beneficial. That works for me because I always take a full rest day after that long ride. I think it’s definitely personal how much intensity you can handle on the filler rides
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It is a long ride, it’s not a really long ride for an endurance athlete.
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I mean, it’s all relative, but 5 hrs is like 25-50% of the weekly budget for most. Surely thats a long ride.
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Well yes 5 hrs at 25% is 20 hours a week and would cover most riders.
But the question wasn’t whether it was a large proportion of someone’s average weekly riding hours, but rather is 5 hours a very long duration for a well trained endurance cyclist, the answer being no.
You have 3600 above and below the denominator and thus can eliminate it to simplify your equation. The same with ftp, it’s above and below denominator and can be eliminated.
Well I disagree with that.
If you plot a graph of ride durations I’m sure 5 hours would be on the right side of the bell curve. Thus “long”.
I mean it should be doable, but it would be (one of) the longest ride of the week or even month.
But anyway this is a discussion on semantics im sure, and a bit off topic.
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FYPFY
Haha. I figured someone would say that. 
100xy^2
I’m sure 2 hours is also on the right side of the curve. We agree in that I said 5 hours was long, I disagreed it was very long.
A 5 hour endurance ride should be easily doable for the moderately trained.
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Carbohydrate intake during exercise only really makes a difference if you’re exercising for more than 1.5-2 h in the fasted state (i.e., in the morning without eating breakfast). What I was referring to is your habitual carbohydrate intake in meals.
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For me, it’s the carbohydrate thing. If I get to 300-450 grams of carbohydrate per day, I can workout day to day and week to week without feeling constantly knackered. (About 7-8 hours per week.) On hard workout days, I’ll shoot for the 400+ grams. I do it with slow, complex carbohydrates (oatmeal, brown rice, legumes, bananas) rather than guzzling maltodextrin.
Could never get much higher than 6.
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This might be helpful:
But to cut to the chase a bit:
That would be 169 TSS/d, which is unlikely to be sustainable as it is greater than 150). So, if you’re training 21 h/wk, the average IF would have to be less than 0.75. OTOH, if you’re only training, say, 10 h/wk? Then you could probably average at least 0.80-0.85 (as that would result in a CTL of 100).
As I wrote in the above-cited article 20 or so years ago, most folks whose CTL is less than about 100 realize that they could handle more, if only they had more time (or motivation*) and/or life didn’t keep getting in the way.
*My wife raced at a high level, doing HP International, Tour of Montreal, Liberty Classic, etc. Her teammates once gave her grief for riding on Christmas morning before coming to a group get-together. They considered that compulsive, whereas my wife’s attitude was, why wouldn’t you ride? That’s undoubtedly partially why she became a champion, and they didn’t.
“While you’re resting, your competition is training.”
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We’re all individuals, but we’re all the same species. That’s why when you quantify training load in a cogent manner, there is rather limited variability between individuals in terms of what is maximally sustainable (i.e., a CTL of ~100 to ~150 TSS/d, regardless of whether you’re a world class roadie, an elite track cyclist, or a MAMIL).
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Absolutely agreed. I was saying I can’t do my endurance rides above .75 or so like you were talking about. It seriously impacts my higher intensity work or I end up wearing myself out since I do a lot of endurance riding. There are lots of folks here with the same results as me, but there are those who train like you too, so I was telling them to try it and see what works best for them.
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What a silly thing to say. Is it long or very long. Who cares? The point is you got to ride for a long time to get stimulus from riding at a low IF.
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Still unclear to me (and I know it’s a complex and controversial subject): What additional adaptation is provided by very long, lower intensity rides that one can’t get from say a 1-1.5h threshold or SS workout?
My own experience is that lots of shorter threshold and VO2 workouts make long rides feel very easy, and of course they’re easier to schedule and recover from than 4-5h outings. I’m reading through various old Zone 2 threads to try to better understand if/why lots of low intensity work makes sense, but if the more informed folks here have links or takes I’d love to see them.
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One obvious limitation is that fuelling long rides is a guess if you’ve never (or rarely) done it. How many carbs per hour do I need to keep pushing this power? If I have this many carbs will I have gastro issues? One way to know is to do it.
Another issue is pacing. It’s one thing knowing that you ‘should’ be able to ride at X% of FTP for Y hours; it’s another thing actually doing it.
Third, you may find that hard efforts become very different with 3+ hours of riding already in the legs. Asking your body to produce 100% for 10 minutes when fresh, versus when you have done 3000kj of work, are very different demands. To a degree, long rides condition you for that.
Finally, as mentioned above, fit issues and conditioning problems only tend to show themselves on longer rides. Discovering that you get pain in your back/neck/saddle after 3 hours, when you have at least the same to ride, is not a fun experience.
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I can only speak from personal experience on this one.
Long easy rides (or slightly shorter tempo rides) consistently have a disproportionate effect on my aerobic fitness than I otherwise would expect them to have based on TSS alone.
As an example, after coming off a break I was doing 8-10h a week with nothing longer than 2h rides. Then I had a day off so I did my first 4 hour ride in a while.
By two days after my 4-hour ride, my HR at z2/tempo/threshold intensities had dropped by 10-15bpm. RPE dropped as well - there was a 10-20w difference in equivalent RPE. This effect was sustained going forwards; whereas there had been only minor improvement over time prior to this.
It’s always most obvious when I’m just getting back into riding or haven’t done any long rides in a while. Within a few weeks of regular long rides the effect seems to be saturated. (Unless you start doing even longer ones).
My best guess is that there is some training stimulus whose intensity is duration dependent that improves metabolic/energy efficiency in your muscles. Whatever it is, it seems to happen pretty quickly (within days) based on my experience.
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