That’s good to know! Well, maybe I can nudge it up a bit but 20 hours, think I would be making me quickly a divorced person 
Don’t be afraid to use 2 a days and early mornings.
This, I can be very aero and can make a very small hole. I am also relatively powerful (from an amateur stand point). I however am also very heavy, especially for someone my height and frame size (5’9, 205lbs).
I find myself in races always struggling or getting dropped on climbs and pretty much dragging a group or myself back to the lead pack when it levels out. If I would just get with the times and loose some weight it would be much better - I however like cake, pizza and the occasional taco bell and cycling is just fun so I can eat cake, pizza and occasionally taco bell 
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Gammon is 120TSS and is a 2 hour workout
Doing that on 2 or 3 consecutive days per week delivers a very noticeable effect and is pretty manageable.
And you would still have 6 hours per week to do other workouts
I’m not afraid of double days but I do like my sleep 
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Yeah, you are likely not anywhere close to your potential at 60 ctl. CTL is the same as “fitness” in intervals.icu.
I’ll push my ctl into the 130’s about a month before a big target race and then taper down to around 120 for the race. For me, the key to building up to that number is a bunch of mid/high Z2 work and limiting hard sessions to a couple per week. I don’t ride hard that much, but all of my z2 stuff is on the higher side of the zone. You can rack up a bunch of tss noodling around at .7 IF. 15-20 hours a week working up to around 1000tss with a big “push” week about a month prior to my event where I’ll overload with 25+ hours and ~1400 tss.
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Sorry, yes, I did mean fitness on intervals in the 60s. In the build phase, for me that’s two hard (sweet spot say) sessions each between 1-1.5hr per week, a couple of longer outdoor rides totalling about 6 hours which usually converge on about 0.6-0.7IF. Plus one or two other turbo sessions endurance focussed.
Perhaps I need to spend less time on this forum and more time riding 
Good to know though, all talking each other up that there is hope in doing more!
Why not both?
I’ll sometimes read the forum on a Z2 session. Indoors of course.
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Another approach to consider is sandwiching your workouts into a longer Z2 ride. This has been a game changer for me. An hour of Z2 to warm up, then intervals, than as much Z2 at the end as time allows. For me, that got me to a point where .7IF almost feels like soft pedaling and you can do it all day. And that translated to being able to hold that wattage easily after a hard session (or the hard first hour of a race).
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I would agree with others that a CTL of 60 sounds pretty low for 10-12 hours. You can either increase volume, or add more intensity within whatever volume you can fit in your life.
In my experience, I have had better success with splitting the difference. Upping the volume to an avg of 14-15 hours per week. That would include some weeks up to 18, and a rest week of maybe 10-12 hours. But also including specific interval work for 2-3 days within those hours. Usually gets my CTL up to the 110 range. You gotta figure out what works best for you and your lifestyle.
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These longer workouts with intervals mixed in are very effective for me too. If I got to pick, I would do longer rides every ride even on interval days. I find shorter 60’, even if done with intensity, don’t build fitness nearly on the same level as doing the same workout with a couple of extra hours of endurance mixed in, even if the TSS might say otherwise.
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Cos sweat pours from me like it’s going out of fashion, even in a cold cellar with a large industrial fan on full tilt. Also causes issues with my glasses steaming up or similarly just sweat pouring down the lenses.
@grwoolf @lee82 suggestion of tacking on some endurance sounds similar. I’m always tempted to cut down my interval sessions to just the intervals but by keeping that zone 2 time around it on the same session, it probably has a double edged effect of adding time and durability.
Lots of decent insight here. Def do some strava stalking and see how your competitors are doing in the same areas of the race. Would throw in threshold intervals weekly and vo2. Also maybe one day a week if you have time could be a sim ride where you do start off hot and settle in and stay on the gas.
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Personally, I think it is better to focus on ‘bigger engine’ vs the race specific intervals that target anaerobic power / repeatability, etc. If you have better anaerobic repeatability won’t you just last a little longer than 10-15min before you blow up? I think the bigger engine (higher FTP) means the anaerobic demands are not as great, better recovery between efforts, and you have a better chance to last longer. It sounds like they are ‘out engin-ing’ you.
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Agree, bigger engine is going to be the key for that distance. Which really comes back to more volume.
Caveat being that 3-4 hour rolling road races are brutal and really test every aspect of your cycling. You need short power and repeatability to deal with all the accelerations and attacks on the hills. Big engine and fatigue resistance to be able to keep doing that for 3-4 hours. Nailing the fueling is a big factor. And then over that duration the group riding and handling skills really count as well as if you’re burning unnecessary matches it’s going to really hurt you.
I think it’s probably the hardest type of event to do well at. You can train to be pretty good at crits off low volume. You can train to be pretty good at long climbing sportives off relatively low volume because you’ve only really got to specialise for long sub threshold efforts. I train 10-12 hours/week and do quite a lot of road races around 2 hours and even at that distance you notice that a lot of the guys who are a threat in crit races run out of gas, and that’s short enough that you can get away with sub optimal fueling. The 3-4 hour races I’ve done have been really attritional with people getting dropped pretty easily in the second half just because they’ve not fuelled enough, or don’t have the fatigue resistance, or simply burnt too many matches getting to that point. Real test of the strongest going for that long.
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Horses for courses as they say. I’d argue that most gravel races (especially the longer ones) require/reward a big engine and endurance much more than a rolling road race. And I guess it depends on what you mean by “hard”. Most road races are much easier to avoid getting dropped, but can be hard to get a result when a big group comes to the finish. Road races are generally more tactical and often have a lot of soft pedaling between the hard spots. With good tactics and a decent sprint, you can win a rolling road race without being one of the strongest riders in the pack. Much tougher to pull that off in a gravel race, it’s just really hard to be there at the finish if you aren’t one of the strongest.
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Doing your intervals in your long ride ftw! 
I think you are totally right.
I did very fine in la marmotte. I do very good in the crits in this area as well. But those 3hours+ rolling hills are just killing me everytime i try to hold on.
I guess it depends a bit on what the racing is like around your way and definition of “rolling”! Here, rolling tends to mean there are enough hills to make it pretty selective. And road races are typically fields of <100 on roads that aren’t closed, so if you get dropped on your own or with one or two other riders you have basically zero chance of getting back on, and once you’re far enough off the back the last race car will pull round you, and at that point many/most people will just call it a day and pull in next time they go past race HQ unless they’re already on the last lap. Nobody really cares about times or finish positions outside of getting points. Different if there was an early split and there’s a meaningful second group still working together to fall back to.
The gravel races I’ve done have been more like triathlons insofar as it’s very competitive at the front, but there are also a lot of people who are just aiming to finish and get a good time. So being dropped by the front group isn’t such a big deal, you’ll just pick up other groups behind and can still get a good finish place. Similar to things like the Marmotte. I would enter a gravel race with sub optimal fitness and still have a great time. Entering a 3-4 hour rolling road race with sub optimal fitness is generally pretty unpleasant!
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