grolby

If you can't afford a coach, and lots of us can't, The Cyclist's Training Bible is a very good place to start.

Also, 6-10 hours is a very wide range. As a general rule, JRA without structure penalizes you less the more hours you do (this is why some people conclude, wrongly, that in order to be fast they need to do 20 hour weeks). If you're regularly doing 10 hours - which I doubt - you might be able to hang on even if you're not paying much attention to structured training. If you're normally doing more like 6, a lack of attention to what kind of riding you are doing and when is going to leave you pretty screwed.

Most of us with limited time to train (right now I'm at about 8.5 hours if everything goes perfectly) do our shorter, more focused sessions on weekdays with longer workouts on the weekend. That gives you a pretty good mix of what most of us need while not stressing our schedules too much. Higher intensity in the shorter sessions, with more aerobic engine work in the longer ones. A pretty common structure is to have Monday and either Thursday or Friday as a rest day, with the other days as workout days. It's important not to try to compensate for a lack of hours during the week with a marathon session on one day. That is, if you're getting maybe four hours during the week from two 1.5 hour and one 1 hour workout and you decide to push yourself up to 10 hours by doing a 2 hour ride on Saturday and a 4 hour ride on Sunday, that's not likely to work out so great as a training strategy. You'd probably be better off doing 8 hours and not wasting yourself on one day.

I'm sure people will quibble with what I'm saying there, but I'm not even trying to give you "training 101" here, more like the high school calculus prep session to get you an idea of the kind of material you're going to be exposed to later. Get the Training Bible and read it a good couple of times and you'll start to get some idea of what training aims to accomplish, and how to put something basic together.