Short Endurance rides maxed out?

Training
1

I’m doing a Masters training plan and have reached level 5.9 Endurance. In my plan I have one 60 minute endurance ride, one 90 minute endurance ride and a longer endurance ride at the weekend which I do outside.

What I’m finding is that at level 5.9 I’ve maxed out 60-90 minute endurance rides, all rides of that duration are now listed as ‘Achievable’ and I’m repeating the same few workouts.

I’m worried that these rides have now become pointless and a waste of time. Do I need to increase the duration to continue progressing or does repeating these same few workouts still produce fitness benefits?

2

You can either add some extra time of push the intensity up to more than 100% before the workout…or maybe move onto another training stimulus…are you coming to the end of a phase?

3

The point is to ride 60-90m in Z2, not to max out the PL on these. If you’re riding inside of Z2, you’re getting the benefit … unlike a threshold/vo2/etc. interval ride, there’s no pushing higher on Z2 without adding to the length.

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4

Except this will turn an endurance workout into something else.

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5

Can you ride more/ longer on those days?
If not I wouldn’t push the intensity up any further (imo)
but keep your hard days hard and easy days easy.

6

Every training plan I’ve ever done has repeats of endurance workouts at the same duration. I have to believe that there is “time in zone” value to these repetitions. Admittedly however, I increase the duration of my “long ride” each week until peak fitness for my “A” event. But still, the 2 hour endurance rides that repeat week over week must be beneficial, otherwise, they wouldn’t be prescribed.

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7

Check out this episode from the empirical cycling podcast: 300k: Time Crunched Training - Empirical Cycling

Basically, you can drive fitness gains by increasing the intensity on these endurance rides but you will eventually hit a point where your recovery will be compromised and you will no longer be able to sustainably progress your interval workouts. Unfortunately, the most sustainable way to progress is by extending the duration of these rides, not the intensity. If you are limited on time though there is no reason to stop doing these rides, they are not a waste of time. Its just that the benefits from doing them will eventually plateau if you don’t progress them in some way

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8

Change one endurance ride to a tempo ride if you are recovering from the endurance maxed out rides okay.

9

And there is nothing wrong with that even if it becomes tempo as long as one can recover from it and still hit the key workouts.

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10

I pretty much aligns with my thoughts.

So any increase in intensity i.e moving into tempo, needs to be carefully consider based on recovery, that is not the same as saying don’t do it.

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11

The max 90 minute endurance ride is Bays +1 at 6.8. It has bursts in it.

12

Eventually, as your fitness (and ftp) increases, the power at the top of your endurance zone will increase. For me, over time last year, I noticed my HR was lower at the same z2 power I had been riding at for months. e.g. I had been riding at 123 bpm (seems to be the most comfortable/natural feeling), which was 130 watts at that time, and eventually started noticing that I was down closer to 118 bpm when holding 130 watts for the 60-90 minutes, so I bumped up the power to a level that got me back to that 123ish bpm. After some months of varying 60-90 minute sessions (and pushing some sessions to the 130bpm top of my z2), I’m holding 170 watts at 123 bpm, and the top of my z2 is up around 190watts.

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13

Possibly, but it sounds like OP fitness has increased so pushing it up a bit will give more stimulus - more volume would be better but it depends if they are time crunched. A FTP test is probably in order.