60 Minutes Instead Of 90 Minutes

My workouts are T-Th-Sa. Yesterday I did a 3 hour mountain bike ride. Technical ST with rocks, small features, climbing, DH flow, etc… I was pretty tired today but did the workout today I was supposed to do yesterday. Honestly the thought of 90 minutes was just too much so I did a variation of Warlow (did Warlow -2) for an hour at the full intensity. Is it a bad thing to periodically do this when needed?

In general substituting a - version when feeling fatigued is fine. Likewise a + version when feeling stellar. However, consistency is the key to incremental gains, so if you’re doing these three hour rides every weekend then reassess your training goals. You don’t have to stop the fun ride, just factor it into your training plan, recognizing that it is an unstructured workout. @Jonathan intentionally loads his training Monday-Friday specifically so he can have an unstructured ride on the weekend - it’s his motivation.

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My main reason for training is to increase my ability and conditioning for mountain biking. I am in my office M-W-F longer hours compared to T-Th. Since I weight train M-F it is much easier to do two of my smart trainer workouts on T-Th since I can do my weight training in the early morning and my TR in the late afternoon on those days. Unfortunately this pushes one of my TR workouts to the weekend. Since I only mountain bike 1 day of the weekend I sometimes have to move my Saturday TR to Sunday.

Can you do a 1.5hr workout T or Th? If so, you’d have the option of switching out the Sat workout to one of those days and move the hour one to Sat.

Just reset the Monday to 60 min always, and if you feel good or ride shorter on Sunday, make it 90 min. Then you are exceeding the goal, vs having to cut it down and feeling like you didn’t achieve the goal. Do the longer structure another day like others suggested, so you know you’ll be fresh.

If you have that gut feeling of not being recovered enough, you’re probably right. Trust it. It’ll just make your next workout even better.