Uncle Ted

I started riding last September and of course noticed immediate and pretty quick improvement, but now things have slowed down. At one point i had convinced myself that I was going to try and do a few amateur races, but that seems to be way beyond my current ability. Is it reasonable to expect that if i went from pretty sedentary in September and have been training 4-8 hours a week i'd still be stuck at 17-18 mph tops over 10 mile stretches at LT, or should i think about changing my training up a bit? How long does it take usually to go from out of shape to cat 5 competition fitness? I'm 29 BTW and not overweight but probably am carrying around 5-10 pounds I could lose.

grebletie

If you've hit a plateau, I would mix your training up a bit. You need to hit your body with different training stimuli. Try longer intervals at threshold, like 10-30 minutes. Also try some shorter intervals at vo2 max, which should be around 3-8 minutes long. Those will help to raise your power at threshold if you've hit a plateau.

Also, if you can, I would train more hours at lower intensity, to build your aerobic engine. Barring that, and since your hours seem limited, I would recommend lots of sweet spot training (SST). Basically, cycling is an aerobic sport, and you need to develop your aerobic engine.

This article provides a rough guide on how to go about it: https://www.pezcyclingnews.com/?pg=fullstory&id=3232

Given that you are training 4-8 hours a week, you should be able to do SST and intervals and be safe from overtraining.

UmneyDurak

Well how long are your usual rides? In general on a weekends people usually do longer rides, three+ hours. On weekdays shorter rides, but that are higher intensity, for example one or two days of intervals.
As for how long... It really depends on a person, and your training. I think with a descent training program, about a season. There are some people who are genetic freaks, and will go through couple of levels in one season, but thats very very very rare.

Uncle Ted

Winter weather has kept me from being too consistent about it, but what I typically aim at is an hour tempo ride and a 6X6 interval session about 4-5 BPM over LT once a week each. I also try to fit in 2 hour long aerobic rides during the week in zone 2 and a longer zone 2 ride on the weekends of about 2 hours. I realized after getting the Friel book and a HRM in December that I had been doing sub threshhold rides pretty much all the time and was basically getting really tired, so the new program has only been going for 6-7 weeks.