Originally Posted by
Carbonfiberboy
I'm 69, been training for a long time. My advice is to do volume, lots of volume, all you can tolerate, at lower levels, zones 1 and 2. Never go hard enough to breathe hard or fast. Gradually ramp up the mileage. When you're doing 200 miles/week, you can drop 1 or 2 days base training and substitute 1 set of 4 X 8' zone 5 intervals (over lactate threshold, as hard as you can tolerate for 8') on those days. Avoid overtraining by monitoring your morning resting and morning standing heart rates. A 6-8 beat increase in resting or a 10 beat increase in standing indicates a need to take it easier for a couple days or until it comes back down a bit.
Since you have a background in weight training, I wouldn't recommend doing any of that. Just ride your bike.
For training rides, I used to try to stay right at my multi-hour effort maximum. For me, that's a heart rate around 145. And I do group rides that are fast for me, that push me much harder than I want to do solo.
But this year, I'm going to try "Polarized Training". Their motto is "your hard rides aren't hard enough and your easy rides aren't easy enough"! It seems that the long, easy rides help adapt to burning fat more efficiently, and allow for full recovery after the intense sessions.
Here's an interesting BF thread on Polarized Training:
Zone 2 lecture, with lots of different viewpoints in the thread. There's a 30 minute lecture linked from the first post, but I had trouble with the video. Here's the
same video on vimeo. It's pretty interesting.
I'll do lots of miles kept at an easier pace, maybe 125-135 heart rate, and some extra hard intervals (by doing a fast group ride) once a week or so. I normally just ride 3 days a week, but I want to add more days this year. I'm aiming for some longer event rides this year, and want to focus on endurance. I tried this easier pacing on a 3 hour ride a few weeks ago, and it was hard to stay that slow! I wanted to keep bumping the speed.