ya, I figure it's the same as when we were younger, the more we train, the stronger and bigger our muscles become. Sure, age must come into play, but c'est la vie and we just have to accept that we aren't as strong as before.

Does anyone remember watching the Charlie Brown cartoons? With the teacher's voice being how the kids perceive it -- bwaa bwaa bwaa - ie, noise the kids aren't really listening to or understanding--all the physics talk and techno talk here kinda does that for me.

I just say that because I don't bother with trying to figure out the math or whatever, but I do know that the more hours I put in on a bike, and if I do exertions regularly (in my case, sprinting for a light, or purposely riding up hills) along with eating well, sleeping well, my leg muscles get bigger and stronger.
Just as when I was younger, except I accept that I have been and always will be a pretty average rider, and getting slower with each year.

You're going to be 31 days on the road? Going on a longish tour lets you get in shape. You will be in much better shape at the back end of the tour (or at least that has been my experience). So rather than aiming for 100km a day for 31 days, I'd think about rest stops on the front end for recovery with the longer mileage coming in at the back end.

Tourist in MSN Thanks for this source, which is quite instructive. Shows that at low intensity (i.e. touring) fat is more important than glycogen, and the caloric total is very close to what I experience. Probably one of the best argument in favor of GORP (mix or peanuts and raisins), but I'll have to read more attentively.

You are welcome.

The body does not rapidly burn fats, the fats are not very soluble. So your energy level is low when you are burning fats.

Plus, you have to train your internal organs to get ready to pull those fats out of your fat cells and turn the fats into energy. That is why I was suggesting the multi-hour training sessions. If you never exhaust your stored sugars in your muscles or blood stream, you do not train the rest of your body to extract those stored fats for use. That is why when I am building up my endurance in late winter or early spring, I am not ingesting any carbs shortly before or during the ride. Or if I have any carbs, they are minimal. I want my body to function well without a scheduled stream of carbs, so I train that way.

Excellent article, thanks for sharing. Do you know of any similar articles about fat-adapted cycling, which I understand as Z1/Z2 efforts that rely more upon fat stores to fuel a ride? The above article states,

I'm curious if there's any articles with data about this adaptation?

I am not aware of any, I do not seek this stuff out so there could be a mountain of stuff out there. But I really liked the graph in that article, so I saved a copy to my hard drive.

But I do recall a few years ago on youtube the GCN guys did a few videos on Keto. That had a very good set of videos on riding only on fats, not carbs.

DId a search and found parts 2 and 3:

I was too lazy to search for part one.

I think when I ride longer than an hour or two, I am in and out of keto for the rest of the day. I might stop, have a granola bar, and within minutes I have a blood sugar spike and that should take me out of keto, but a granola bar of calories lasts for minutes, not hours, so back into keto soon after. But, I do not really notice that transition.

Last summer I did a 200k brevet with a couple others, we were not concerned about time, rode as a group. I recall one gal had a big load of french fries, after a short time, maybe 15 minutes, she had power to burn for quite a few miles, but that eventually wore off and she was no longer in the lead. I also am a big fan of french fries on an endurance ride.

That said, if a food has more than half of the calories from fats, that will slow me down until I can digest it. Fats are digested much slower than carbs and the body has to expend energy to digest a lot of fats. My experience (we are all different), french fries have about the highest amount of fats that I want to eat when I am on a long ride. More fats than half of the calories, I am riding slow for a few hour after eating it.

I will have a meal like this fish and chips, photo below, when I am only five miles from the campground at end of day, but a meal like this will put me into slow motion for a few hours. So, if I have hours to go, I would not want anything like that.

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...e181547d3d.jpg

This fish and chips was REALLY good.

Different topic, I just saw another article today that you might be interested in:
https://www.roadbikerider.com/zone-2...ian-intervals/

When I was younger and had summers off from college teaching, I toured in the alps four summers in a row. I trained for the trip by running stair laps at our local football stadium all winter long; indoors when the weather was bitter cold or snowy.

The real benefit was the aerobic stuff...I ended up with lung capacity 40-50% larger than average. I remember climbing in Switzerland and could see my breath in the cool mountain air, and how low my breaths were per minute, even on the alpine passes. My appetite was phenomenal.

Interesting. Stupid question -> is this VO2Max?

Do you know where I can get some of this "younger" stuff that you speak of?

I think you need a time machine to travel back several years. Or in my case, decades.

An increase in Watts from 95 10 130 is ~37%. Is this reasonable for someone of your age (what ever that is)?
My approach is to plan to my level of fitness. Then each day has a target destination, a reach, if things are going well, and a bail out destination for 20 knot headwinds, breakdowns, etc.