Originally Posted by Allegheny Jet

Yes and no. Experience is a good teacher but lags some in the training side. If you raced in a local Tue Worlds your body would adapt to the surges and attacks that take place in races. Keying your workout to address specific goals will get you there faster. The idea of hard intervals is to trigger the body to adapt to the stresses and build up strength, CV and fueling abilities. Simply put to ride up short steep hills with the group you need to train at a level that requires more effort than race pace. If the best you can do is needed time and again during a race you will soon be OTB as the body can't keep doing 100%. It always bugs me when someone says they played at 150% WTF?, how can you do that without being a sandbagger during the rest of the game? The only thing I know of that can go above 100% was the space shuttle engines which would be at 104 % at times, and look at what happened back then. Back on topic, as that was my track coach persona coming out. When you practice going up those steep little hills concentrate on form and at a pace that gets you to the top that is harder than race pace then recover for at least 5 minutes. You should not hit Z5 HR on 1 -2 minute efforts until after you have done several, if able to hit it at all. That kind of effort will build strength to climb and sprint.

To build recovery there are variations of the 20"/20" drill where you are "on the pedals hard" for 20" then "off the pace" for 20” and repeat… for sets of 5' and add time/reps and intensity as you get stronger.

Or, find a 20" hill that allows you ride into it at race pace then crush the effort up to top it with room to turn around then coast back down, then when your HR drops to 120 bpm, have at it again. You can do a few sets of 5 reps.

Another drill my coach occasionally has me do is sets of 15" seated building up speed right to 15" OPS sprinting followed by 15" seated easy spin leading to the next rep of 15" seated, 15" OTS, 15" recovery.... for sets of 7 reps.

Others can and might suggest different variations and drills which will accomplish the same. I think the key when doing those kind of efforts is that it is very hard but never at 100% maximum effort. I used to tell my sprinters and hurdlers that the key to speed was how strong are you and how close to 100% effort can you get while still being in control to make changes to your stride.