to work on one area of training per day or could you actually mix a little of everything on every ride?

I find it very difficult to accomplish working on a certain training item per ride. Hill repeats are easy, I can do 10 of them before boredom or fatigue sets in. What I am most interested in bettering in my cycling is my speed/strength/endurance in climbing. Are hill repeats a required 'to do' item on your weekly training list to build or maintain form? I am really just starting to get interested in other areas of cycling, like targeted training for bettering specific areas. I've been cycling since Sept 15 and have 2500+ miles so far with lots of different riding. But according to everything I have seen, climbing is my worst area, funny though is that it's my favorite because it is so challenging. I change up my repeats each time between cadence, gear, standing and seated. Sadly I have not done them in a couple of weeks... but am tomorrow morning.

As long as you are not sore or tired the next ride, no harm in mixing it up every time.

Sounds like you need to find steeper and longer hills.

The most fun thing is to go on hilly group rides with people who are a little faster than you are. Then you get a little of everything. A 3-4 hour ride provides a good bit of training stimulus. So that's one way to do it. The other of course is a training schedule where you only do one specific thing on a ride, but probably do 3-4 different things, each on a different ride each week. Both training modalities work.

If you're doing the specific objective modality, I wouldn't recommend doing more than one training objective per ride. If you're doing it right, you should be busted after finishing one objective. Doing something else after that would mean not being able to do it well, and thus contraindicated.

If you're doing 10 hill repeats, you're not doing them nearly hard enough. They have to be really hard to get the benefit. The "hard" can be either length or effort. 4 is usually enough for me, sometimes I'll do 5. At 6 I have the feeling that I would have done better to have done fewer harder ones. When you do the last one, you should not be bored, rather on the edge of not being able to do it at all. Say you're doing 6' hill repeats. You ride the hill as hard as you can and not slow down for the whole 6 minutes. You note how far up the hill you got, ride back down and do it again. You should be able to get as far up the hill maybe 3-4 times, but then the next time you don't get as far in 6'. That's when you quit because there's no point in doing slow hill repeats.

If you can't do group rides, just long solo hilly rides are good, too. You should go hard enough that you have trouble finishing the ride if you're after that sort of training stimulus. I basically do two types of rides: hard and endurance. Hard means anything where you are working hard enough that you lose form, speed, ability, etc., until you are just trying to survive until the end of the ride. Endurance means an all day pace where you gear down for hills and try to ride the whole thing without breathing hard. I spend a lot more time on endurance than on hard. The usual recommended balance is 80/20. Try to ride as little as possible in between endurance and hard. It's a waste of energy.

The repeats I did yesterday I went much harder on. I only got 4 good ones in before slowing down. On hill segments on Strava is where I see I am slow. There are many people going much quicker up hill than my ave pace on flats... This is why I want to get faster.

Good for you. Over a period of several weeks of this, you'll start to see a noticeable difference. But don't feel like there's some huge hurry. Steady on does it. The usual estimate is that it takes ~7 years for a beginning cyclist to hit their peak, no matter their age. The adaptation process is slow. So many changes are happening in your body, real physical changes that you may not yet be able to see or feel. Not to discourage you, but rather to encourage you! Steady consistent effort is the thing. Consistency is probably the thing people have the most trouble with. Year-round, too. No more than a couple weeks completely off during any year is best. If you live in a below-freezing winter climate, a set of rollers with resistance is worth about 10 times what they cost in reduced doctor bills over your lifetime. Maybe 100 times. I bought my set in '94 and they're still going strong. I used 'em today. Yes, we ease off a bit in winter, but never stop.

And use Strava to track your efforts, but ignore the efforts of others. You are the only one who matters. And your loved ones.

Thanks. Before starting on Strava I kept good records and had a few courses that I would do on occasion to track progress. The dedication is the easy part for me. The hard part is the patience. I've already seen great improvements looking back over time and that fuels my motivation even more.