Originally Posted by
hansen01
-I am riding about 80-100 miles per week in 3 rides. Is this enough?
No. You want to ride at leaast 5 days a week. Fitness is pretty much an exponentially decaying average of your daily work, and that can be higher when you have 20 hours of rest between two harder workouts than one longer workout every other day.
6-7 days can help endurance, although rest days on the bike require enough discipline to ride boringly slow even when pre-schoolers on tricycles are flying by. Some people don't have the disposition for that.
-Should I be start specific training (sprints, hills, spinning) or does that really matter at this point?
Yes. Threshold intervals can significantly increase the power you can sustain for an hour and fractions thereof. Shorter intervals can improve brief efforts.
-Is it better to ride with the group as long as I can even if it means limping my way back the last half of the ride?
No. The chances of the group ride being hard enough to stress targeted systems but not so hard you accumulate lactate and can't do a sustained effort are approximately zero.
Conversely if you want to road race experience riding close to other people and respond to accelerations is going to help.
You also need to work lower effort rest days, weeks, and months into your schedule. Otherwise you won't be fresh enough for your hard efforts to be tough, will over-train, and be both tired and slow.