Let me correct my posting.. All my rides show that my average HR is about 151-155 85-90+ % of the time. My approximate Max HR is about 185.

The two constants I have where I ride and where I'm going to be riding in the summer are hills, and wind. To me, flat feels wierd. Flat with no wind makes me feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone.

My primary goal at the moment is better endurance on the big steep hills. I have a related endurance problem when xc-skiing which I'll expand on later.

Endurance for longer rides, especially into the constant infernal headwinds we get around here is a secondary goal for me at the moment. Riding 45-46 miles with a few short breaks totalling less than 10 minutes left me feeling that I still had another 15 miles in my legs so a century by the end of the summer would seem to be more than reasonable.

When I do the longer steeper hills on my 1 hour loop I generally hit them pretty hard for the 2 minutes it takes to do them and my recovery has improved considerably from last year. I'm thinking that it may be time to do some reps. Since my calves are already musclebound I've been spinning up hills while keeping an eye on my cadence (I'll spin too high sometimes) and I'll rise out of the saddle when close to the top

At this point I don't need any more muscle on my legs. I've already got legs like a running back and if I start to put on any more muscle my legs will tend to tie up. Some lactate thereshold work would probably be good though. We don't have many long nasty grades here at home but there are some lovely ones (some people I know think of them as a deathwish) that I know of up north where my cottage is can make things .. ahem.. more than interesting and I'm thinking about doing some of them this summer.

At this point I suspect that the best thing for me to do is to start doing some reps on some of the nice nasty neighbourhood hills. I don't seem to have an endurance problem when it comes to long rides or with long gradual hills but I do have a problem with running out of gas on the long steep grades. I've got the same problem when I climb steep hills when xc-skiing and my HR monitor will beep all over the place. At first I thought it was a problem with technique because xc-skiing is a very technical sport but it appears that the problem is more to do with fitness. If you want to feel beat up in every part of your body, try xc-skiing at a high tempo for a couple of hours. My avg HR was about 10 beats higher and I can see some sustained parts where I was at or slightly above HR max for almost 5 minutes on some of my runs. I'm thinking that I'll have to start running up hills on alternate days in the fall to be better prepared for that.

Would doing interval sprints help with endurance with headwinds ? As a teen I always did interval sprints and it did make a difference. As I can recall I used to do two to three of them on an even shorter 10 mile loop.

The one hour workouts are doable 3-4 times and week (Monday is my rest day) and I can usually do a couple of weekend rides of about 3-4 hours so I can work on different things but that will be interrupted during the summer with kayaking (for the other half of the body). Most of that will be high cadence, shallow dip paddling for long distances (sound familiar ?).