What @4ibanez said…if your longest rides right now are only 1-1.5 hours, do 2 hour endurance rides and slowly add more time. If you are doing 1.5 - 2 hours for your longest rides currently, shoot for 2.5 - 3 hours.
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Having listened to the podcast with Inigo San Milan and Peter Attia, the maximum benefit from Zone 2 is mitochondrial function, and increasing lactate as in efforts above zone 2 seem to shut off these mitochondrial adaptations. As suchm, in the podcast, he recommends working at the higher end of zone 2 describing the intensity (paraphrasing) " you can carry on a conversation, but a listener would know you are exercising". For me, this intensity is in TR’s tempo range.
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yep - they were quite clear on the idea that flooding the muscles with lactate would reduce the benefits of the ISM z2 time. That was a key takeaway for me and good reminder that staying diciplined even on the hills was realy key for these aerobic focus rides.
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I’m not entirely sure how applicable that discussion is to cycling performance though. The discussion was in the context of ‘metabolic’ health and expected weekly volume was 5x1hr if I recall correctly.
If it takes 20ish min to rest after a hard effort, that has different implications in a 1hr ride from a 4-5hr ride. I also have trouble seeing how it is sustainable and most people would recover well if doing 4-5hr rides at 80% max HR / talking test intensity or 10+hrs / week if that puts one in z3 / tempo power zone.
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You can accumulate a lot more hours outside though. Here’s a ride I did at Easter. I spent 9 hours 10 mins pedalling of which, 7 hours 57 mins was zone 2 with some low tempo and some Z1. Elapsed was 9 hours 59 mins, which was 49 mins of stopping at shops to top up water and food, and the odd pee break. No way I’d accumulate that indoors.
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Beast mode!
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Out in the Fens as well, which is as close to continuous pedalling as you get. No hills to coast down. About perfect for a long steady session in Z2.
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Indeed I do my endurance rides in the Cambridgeshire Fens…bloody ugly scenery but great for constant pedal pressure zone 2 - you only need 2 gears - 1 with the wind 1 against! 
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Here’s today’s ride. This is why If I want to do Zone 2 training it has to be indoors. Some of those hills at 3 to 4 mph require power above my threshold.
What’s the steepest gradient on that route?
East Anglia repping heavily on this thread 
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11 to 12% for short segments, quite a bit of 6 to 8%. typical geography where I live. My driveway is 8% up to the road.
Its okay to stray out of z2… it doesn’t make the whole ride worthless from an aerobic endurance perspective. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The general issues are when people do group rides as ‘endurance rides’ and spend 40% in z1, 20% in z2, and 40% above threshold. That ain’t an endurance ride.
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Pretty Much agree, for >90% of the ride I was able to keep my respiratory rate at “conversational”, due to the harder efforts being pretty short.
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If you do a decent job holding z2 for most of it, its fair to say you are doing endurance with “stuff” and all good.
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Here’s the distribution of effort from intervals.icu.
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Hard to tell without seeing an actual power histogram. If it helps you ride more or be happier, do the endurance indoors and intensity work outside. If the roads are safe you might be able to get better at doing endurance downhill.
Here’s HR. Some background. I’m 67 YO and my current FTP per TR ramp test is 185. Resting pulse high 40’s, max pulse 173. Threshold around 160 for sutained intervals.
Here’s the ride with power and pulse data. It reflects the various climbs.
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I did a quick indoor Z2 ride at lunch. It’s the 2nd consecutive day of Z2 after a hard session, and was feeling reasonably good, so I picked a higher Z2 workout (moved all 4 accelerations to the end to spend more time doing useful Z2 stuff).
I’m new to HR analysis and am wondering if HR is considered low or normal for this workout (I know it’s individual, but an idea would be good).
When looking at intervals.icu (based on LTHR) we see a very large proportion spent in AR:
However, Strava (based on max HR) shows vast majority in Z2.
Looking at work after the warm up and up til the sprints, average HR is 134, so near-ish to the top of Z2 based on max HR. So this is more like what I might expect in theory. But in my mind LTHR seems a more robust and sensible metric to base zones on (maybe because I’ve used power for much much longer than I’ve owned an HRM).
Also some decoupling data if of interest. I only had on 1 of 3 fans, so cooling wasn’t great, and I was sweating a reasonable amount.
Apologies for the ramble, and if this is all too vague to give a good answer, but would appreciate some input while we’re talking Z2 