Thank you. I think I understand you to be saying that 85% of FTP may be an appropriate indoor (erg type) endurance zone workout for a time period up to around 2 hours.
I think the point here is you shouldn’t be targeting any particular zone for endurance rides. You should ride as hard and as steady as you can for a given duration provided that its not leaving you fatigued for your next interval workout.
Ok. The whole thing is a matter of context. So for you, there are “filler workouts”. Many of us don’t do that!. I don’t do 1 hour of endurance, unless is a recovery ride.
Give it a try and see if you feel it impacts your hard workouts. If not, then you’re good. For me, personally, that would be way too much intensity and reduce my ability to perform well on the following high intensity workout. As @mcneese.chad mentioned above, we’re all individuals, and what works for Cog or what works for me may or may not work for you.
I’ve read through all this a few times. And googled around a bit to try to find more info. Sort of boggling my mind a bit.
So by cumulative you mean day over day 24 hour periods? There are no durations listed that I can see either of the ‘moderate’ rides or the time span between sessions.
What is the relation of IF to duration? It seems like there isn’t one. You do mention a 5hr ride in the same comment. I’m assuming this is tss related.
So by example I know I can do a 3 hour session at ~72% of ftp and be ‘recovered’ for the most part within a 24 hour span. There is no ‘cumulative’ fatigue. Is that because the tss is <= 150?
So if I’m reading what you wrote correctly, You say there is no adaptation here. Because it’s less than an IF of .75 and at a duration/stress <= 3hrs (and therefore <=150tss).
It does feel a bit like the definition of ‘an endurance trained athlete’ is a person capable of doing back to back 3 hour rides at sub 75% of FTP, effectively, in perpetuity.
Anyway, I really appreciate your participation in these threads. I know it would tire me out if I were you. haha. 
100xy^2 (if you know, you know)
Ok, so assume I have 10h to ride a week - I’m a somewhat serious amateur. Make my (“real”) FTP 300w to make math easy. I do a 3h ride as my “long” ride once a week on the trainer in the weekend. I do two “hard” high intensity workouts a week, each 1-1.5h in duration. That leaves me with 4-5h a week to squeeze into 3 weekday evening rides and leave me with one rest day a week.
You’re saying you would split these remaining hours up into time spent riding around 0.8 (240w). So a typical week for this athlete in your mind would look something like:
M: rest
T: 1.5h hard (4x8min Vo2 or something IDK)
W: 1.5h @ 240w
T: 1.5h @ 240w
F: 1h @ 255w (0.85)
S: 1.5h hard
S: 3h endurance by RPE.
I don’t think he is saying specifically to ride at .75-.85 for those shorter filler rides, rather if you are able to ride at that intensity without sacrificing your interval days, you should. For some people the max sustainable intensity for those shorter rides might be lower.
That’s what I’m trying to clarify, because the comment pretty explicitly says that if the fatigue from doing all these “filler” rides at ~0.8 is causing them problems, then their FTP is too high or they’re not eating enough carbs.
Which is interesting to me as that’s somewhat different than both personal/being coached experience and opinions I’ve heard elsewhere. So I wanna make sure I’ve understood what he’s trying to express before reflecting on it too much.
IF is NP/FTP. If your goal is to gain fitness or sustain through endurance workouts, then You’ll need to ride at a relatively high IF.
What he is saying, I believe, is that you’re not going to be building fitness riding 0.6 IF day or over day for an hour or two bc the stimulus is too low. However, if you did a high quality interval session one day and spin 0.6 IF a day or two after, that makes sense, but those days are allowing you to recover, tho some ‘define’ that intensity as ‘endurance’.
If you ride 0.6 for 5h, that’s enough stimulus to gain fitness because it’s a really long ride.
You just basically need big stimulus to keep pushing up your fitness level. Big stimulus is a relative term to the individual, but if you consider an hour or two at 0.6-0.65 to be a big stimulus, most endurance athletes wouldn’t consider you to be very well trained in the first place
A key comment above
I think a lot of us want to take what he says and apply it to our training plan, or compare it to our real world experience, and that often results in a mismatch
Yeah for me personally if I do a ride higher than .7 IF in between interval days my next interval workout is going to suffer. And I always eat at least 60g of carbs per hour even for 1 hour rides. But I have started pushing the IF on my long weekend rides rather than trying to keep it strictly in zone 2 and I think that has been beneficial. That works for me because I always take a full rest day after that long ride. I think it’s definitely personal how much intensity you can handle on the filler rides
It is a long ride, it’s not a really long ride for an endurance athlete.
I mean, it’s all relative, but 5 hrs is like 25-50% of the weekly budget for most. Surely thats a long ride.
Well yes 5 hrs at 25% is 20 hours a week and would cover most riders.
But the question wasn’t whether it was a large proportion of someone’s average weekly riding hours, but rather is 5 hours a very long duration for a well trained endurance cyclist, the answer being no.
You have 3600 above and below the denominator and thus can eliminate it to simplify your equation. The same with ftp, it’s above and below denominator and can be eliminated.
Well I disagree with that.
If you plot a graph of ride durations I’m sure 5 hours would be on the right side of the bell curve. Thus “long”.
I mean it should be doable, but it would be (one of) the longest ride of the week or even month.
But anyway this is a discussion on semantics im sure, and a bit off topic.
FYPFY
Haha. I figured someone would say that.
100xy^2
I’m sure 2 hours is also on the right side of the curve. We agree in that I said 5 hours was long, I disagreed it was very long.
A 5 hour endurance ride should be easily doable for the moderately trained.
Carbohydrate intake during exercise only really makes a difference if you’re exercising for more than 1.5-2 h in the fasted state (i.e., in the morning without eating breakfast). What I was referring to is your habitual carbohydrate intake in meals.