Originally Posted by Heathpack

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.