@frank I’ve thought about contacting a coach. I’d give him/her all of my ride data and say “can you make me faster by introducing some structured training to my riding, without greatly increasing the volume and without making most of the riding I do less enjoyable”? If the answer was yes I’d totally be up for it. If it was “no”, or “not really”, I’d rather just keep doing what I’m doing. But also, if I knew that I would definitely get much faster by increasing my volume by (say) 50%, I’d be tempted to make time to give it a go.
@Neil_Bell I am still very unclear on what your current riding looks like. If you gave us details on what your normal week looks like - How many days of riding, how long, what are you doing on those rides…I am sure you could get some suggestions from myself and others on changes that would likely improve your fitness.
Then you can decide if some of the changes are something you would want to adopt.
@Aaron_Fader It varies a lot between summer and winter, partially because of the weather but more importantly the light - during the week in summer I’ll ride in the evenings, often going out as late as 8pm when the roads are quieter.
In summer a typical week might be: two weekday (evening) rides of around 35 miles at a decent pace (tempo mixed with VO2 max and threshold sections driven by the terrain. Mostly flat/rolling roads but I’ll sometimes pick a route that has, say, a 5 minute hill climb in the middle and do that at max effort). Weekend maybe a 60 mile ride at an only slightly reduced pace, usually moderately hilly. Some weeks I might get out 4 days, and if the weather’s bad I might substitute an FTP or Vo2 max based indoor session for one of the rides, maybe with a z2 indoor ride the following day. Sometimes also I’ll do Vo2 max hill repeats (around 4x 4 minutes) on a local hill that’s near me, and a few times each year I’ll do a longer weekend ride of 70-100 miles.
In the height of winter (mid October - February) the vast majority of my riding is indoors on Zwift and similar platforms, and I’ll usually average around 4 sessions a week with a heavy focus on FTP (I enjoy virtual climbing), but also mixing it up with other interval based sessions and the occasional Zwift race. I also try to go the the gym in winter at least once a week and lift things (which I do find quite fatiguing).
I go a lot by feel and intuition in choosing what do do on a given day. If I feel fresh I’ll do something demanding, and I’ll vaguely keep a mental note of how I’ve been balancing various types of effort and try to compensate for stuff I feel I’m missing.
Here’s the 46 mile ride I did today. I’d say this was an atypically constant effort, I wasn’t pushing hard on the hills and treating them as intervals, as I sometimes do.
Here’s a Zwift route I do a lot in winter. I’ll do a full-on 20-25 minute effort on the Zwift Mountain climb (about 103% FTP), recover with some sprints on the descent, and then do a 5 minute effort at SST level (90% FTP) near the end.
What I’m saying is you dont HAVE to increase volume 50%, plenty of people train on less time. So if you’re time constraint you go over that with a coach or find a program that fits your schedule.
My quick notes would be you might benefit from just a little more structure, but I think you have all the basics covered.
1 vo2 max day, 1 threshold/sweet spot day, and 1 longer endurance ride per week is the back bone of a decent plan. Fill in the rest with zone 2 rides. Most importantly, try to make sure that you are generally rested going into those interval days.
And you can keep the structure somewhat loose, but you might benefit from making sure you are building in progressive overload. If on you threshold day, last week you do 2 x 10ish minute hills, maybe this week try and add another couple minutes to each effort. Can do the same with Vo2. Take an easy week every few weeks.
In short, it doesn’t have to be full on super structure or nothing. You could just add a little more intention to to your rides and I bet you might see some gains.
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@Aaron_Fader Very useful, thanks! And reassuring to have confirmed that although I’m not really doing fully structured training, I’m not horribly far off the mark and the attempts I make to semi-structure what I do aren’t a waste of time.
I feel that one area I need to think about is winter vs. summer. My volume is greater in the summer but I do more structured indoor stuff in the winter and greater variation. I think the stuff I do in winter has benefits that carry over into the summer, even if I’m not doing as much of that type of thing in the summer.
My winters tend to be far more structured, and slightly shorter, than my summer riding. It just lends itself that way b/c I’m locked inside on zwift and not doing rides with others. So I can get away with 5 days of focused 90 minute workouts, compared to 3 outside come spring time. So i would def recommend taking advantage of that b/c it will 100% carry over into the spring/summer.
And I agree @Aaron_Fader on “structured”. I wasn’t trying to imply you have to have super rigid plan, but more so just formulating a little balance & coordination to how you approach each week. One of the things I’ll do to force myself into just enjoying the ride and not trying to over do it on down days is just lave the computer home, or turn the screen off.
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Aaron’s recommendations sound very sensible. Overall it really doesn’t sound to me like you need more Z2, just a bit more structure and planning in order to get fitter.
Since you mentioned your age, it might also be worth it to look at specific recommendations for people your age. I gave someone a book about training after 50 a while back as a gift and IIRC one of the big points in the book was that older endurance athletes should somewhat prioritise high-intensity work and weights over low-intensity work.
I think it was this one, Joe Friel is one of the founders of TrainingPeaks and was interviewed on Escape’s Overnight Success a little while back: Fast after 50: How to race strong for the rest of your life, Joe Friel (2015)
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I was doing Z2 for a long time when I was mainly running, and I transferred the same principle to cycling when I first started. I noticed that it wasn’t really working for me, maybe because I was spending too much time in Z2.
After I started training with a coach, I felt I was making much more progress with his Z3/Z5 training sessions, sometimes with a lot of Z5 work. My conclusion is that Z2 is overrated, or at least it wasn’t working for me. In addition, if you’re busy—and most amateur cyclists have demanding jobs—then Z2 can feel like a waste of time. I would focus more on intervals and going to the gym.
Nevertheless, Z2, and especially Z1, can be important before races and fondos.
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