It’s honestly pretty good time in zone considering the hills, and i have the same trouble with focus especially as the rides get longer.
I had a 90 minute Z2 ride after work yesterday in a business park loop with a hill and managed to spend 60% of the ride in Z2 and I thought it was pretty good. Looks like you hit 55% during a +4 hour ride in a very hilly area so I feel like that is a success. It’s certainly an improvement.
The highlighted band is Z2
on these hills, in your easiest gear, at 80 rpm what zone is your power? if z2 is available, then just slow down and pedal easy. If it is not, either get lower gearing, lower your cadence, or accept you are going to have portions of your ride at tempo.
(shakes head in disbelief)
Are you perhaps suggesting that the time spent debating zone 2 and FTP would be better spent riding our damn bikes?
At risk of banality…
“What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret. And not one of them was prepared, truly prepared to believe that it had not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most unprofound and sometimes heart-rending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised [sic] the bottoms of his training shoes. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.”
Good to have another impersonator in the forum. Welcome!
Definitely a Z2 ride to me. It takes time to really dial in your RPE meter so you’re not looking at your power meter all the time but this is much much better than before.
Anecdotally, I’ve found that by keeping my power down more in “Z2” I can ride longer and more often while still being fresh for my harder interval workouts. It also leads to much less coasting down the other side of every hill so you don’t coast/soft pedal for 30+% of your rides.
I can understand why some might find this boring or lame but why would it be “counterproductive”?
Do you get less out of these long rides by just going straight Z2 than by doing Z3/4 up climbs when you feel like it and then Z1 down the other side?
