Originally Posted by DaveLeeNC

It wasn't that long ago that I could just let rest days happen when personal circumstances made riding difficult. 2 or 3 years ago if nothing came up and I ended up riding 9 days in a row - no big deal.

Fast forward just a couple years to age 71 and that is no longer the case. Given a riding pattern of rest day, next day a ride of some consequence but not a race kind of thing, and on the 3rd day I am really dragging. It shows in how I feel (HR vs. RPE is very different, for example) and it shows in the data (power, speed, etc). Tack on another day to the end of that and it will tend to be a miserable ride (where the previous day wasn't that great).

So I am going to have to start enforcing rest days. For me 10-11 hours per week tends to work well and fit in my plans, and it is not clear that at this point I need to change that as a target. So I was thinking of either riding 3 hours every other day or maybe a pattern of 2.5 hours, 2 hours, rest day. Rides longer than 3 hours tend to be both somewhat inconvenient and a very unwanted stressor on my arthritic knees. And 3 hours on a regular basis is something of a stretch here which is the primary motivation for the 2.5, 2, rest plan.

The 'training purpose' here is just to be sure that I have a good base so that if I decided to ever do something 'competitive' that whatever event specific training is required would be coming from a good start.

I am sure that other old guys like me have faced this problem so was just fishing for comments/perspective.

dave