I just thought it would be worth dropping a link to what I just mentioned in another thread here.
Essentially, the duration of your scheduled endurance workouts will be determined by a few things.
- The max duration cap you set for that day of the week in Plan Builder
- The workouts that are available to you based on your Progression Levels
If your goal is to progress to longer workouts, simply change your max duration cap for any endurance days. We won’t exceed that cap as it’s there for a reason, so if you want your workouts to be longer than, say, 90 minutes, change that duration cap to something higher.
As @JoeX alluded to earlier, there is a point around level 5 workouts where James is a commonly prescribed workout because it’s a 90-minute workout at 74% of FTP. For anyone whose max duration cap is at 90 minutes and has an endurance PL of ~5 this might be a workout you’ll see often as it’s basically the “hardest” workout you can do that’s 90 minutes long and still in the endurance zone.
I think that’s the hang-up here. Endurance is mostly limited by the definition of zones, and not as much by one’s abilities as in Sweet Spot, Threshold, VO2 Max, etc. In some ways it makes PLs seem less effective, but I’d argue that they actually work just as well in these cases, albeit just in a slightly different way.
Again, if you want to increase the duration of your endurance workouts, change the max duration of your endurance days. There are actually plenty of longer workouts at relatively low levels, and you can start to get into 3-hour long rides with a PL of around 3.