Originally Posted by
Drew Eckhardt
If you're going to do a steady 1-1.5 hour hard effort once a week, make it zone 4. That correlates with hard efforts of that duration feeling easier for me and nets more total training stress, although I suspect the science doesn't support that impression.
Falling into the naive "ride hard to get faster" assumption with plenty of Z3 but minimal Z4/Z5 I arrived at a "not slow" plateau very close to what came out just riding Friel Z1/Z2 miles.
Doing a lot of Z3 riding 8-10 hours a week did work well before a week long 418 mile 28,000 vertical foot supported tour.
Z3 is a nice pace for group rides which won't leave you too spent for your hard days.
Ok I looked at my last ride which was a new route for me. Basically the new route cut off about 10 miles and added 300-400' more incline. So now I'm riding 24.4 miles and 2761' of incline. I really had to push harder on the new route since the climbs are pretty steep and there is less flat time to recover. It was a tough ride, but not impossible. I did feel the leg strain a lot more after the ride. Looks like half of the ride was Z3/Z4 and the other half Z2.
I'm going to try and push a little harder on the next ride to see if I can keep my HR in Zone 4.
Here is a pic of the stats for reference.
