Originally Posted by
LGHT
OK I rode last night and it was a tough ride. I rode about 25 minutes to the base of a 8% grade that took me about 10 min to climb. I normally shift down to keep the cadence up, but this time I didn't. I just mashed and mashed it out. After about 1:45 my HR reached 160 so I had to slow down a little down. I usually try and keep it around 150 as my Z5 is around 165. I honestly thought I could push out at least 2 minutes, but I was huffing and puffing after just a minute and couldn't keep my HR down without slowing to a pace under 5mph.
So much for Bing Ring training. I'll have to add in more HIIT training on the trainer as clearly my fitness is not where it needs to be.
I agree with the Carbon's comment below about not slowing down, continuing to push it, especially if this is a 10 minute hill for you.
My LTHR is the same as yours. Spending too much time over LTHR may leave you unable to complete a long ride. But lots of zone 4 time is excellent for CV conditioning.
Just as a matter of perspective as to what is possible, I went out last Sat and rode a strong ride with the intention of riding with intensity. It included a 30 min TT effort up a hill and also 10 min of VO2max intervals. But otherwise I was just chasing a strong friend up some hills, trying to keep up with him. That was a 45 mile ride with 4000 ft of climbing, took around 3:45 and I spent 1 hour 13 minutes in HR zone 4, which for me is from HR 152-168. I've been working on this for 6 months now, so I'm not suggesting that you go out tomorrow and try to spend an hour in HR zone 4. Just pointing out that 5 minutes or 10 minutes at a stretch is exactly what you want to be doing and expanding it from there.
Note that I am not riding like that every day. You've got to go into rides like that somewhat rested. I had been off the day prior, and had three days in a row of moderate riding before that- two lively group rides and one hour interval session on the trainer. So it was a pretty easy week for me, although I had done a very tough climbing ride the Saturday prior and was still bouncing back from that. So you've can't just try to do all intense work, you've got to find a balance to be capable of doing the intense rides too.