Originally Posted by topflightpro

For one thing, most of us are increasing the amount of time we do below threshold each week. I know some guys who start with as few as 4 hours and build from there. Right now, I'm up to 14 hours a week. By November, I'll be pushing 20 hours a week. And in December, I'll be trying to do 25 hours - work and real life often get in the way.

Putting in 20-25 hours a week at below threshold is still a lot of riding and still a lot of total effort.

As for reducing / eliminating the harder efforts, the below-threshold work increases my base fitness, which allows for more harder efforts and faster recovery from those hard efforts later on.

As someone once told me, before you can go fast, you have to go slow.