I know I should probably ignore heart rate but mine goes from 140-170 at the end of baxter for example.
Does this mean my FTP is set too high?
These rides are tiring, and my breathing is high at the end. or do I just suck at steady state rides?
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It can be a lot of factors.
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Are you having enough cooling?
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Do you drink coffee before your workouts? It can effect your HR if you are not used to caffeine.
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How is your breathing? Do you breath from your chest or from your core?
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What is your cadence?
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As long as you have your doctors checks in place and you have no issues, HR should not be a problem.
Good luck
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If your heart is steadily rising from the start of an aerobic ride to the end of the ride, that is a major indicator of a lack of aerobic fitness and is called aerobic decoupling.
If you are in zone 2 power and by the end of a 2 hour steady state ride your heart rate is creeping toward the top end of zone 3 you probably need to focus on your aerobic fitness and make it a priority above intervals or higher intensity work as this is such a limiting factor on any endurance event that will last a few hours especially.
Only thing I would note is that baxter has a lot of cadence changes which may increase your HR if you are outside your usual working range of cadence, however this really shouldn’t lead to an increase of 30 bpm above were your HR should be for that power.
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What is a reasonable increase over a 3 hr endurance workout like Big Mountain? I recently completed TB HV I, II, & III, which pushed my progression levels up into the 7s. This weekend I did Big Mountain as a Sunday replacement in SSB HV I, and saw ~7-8% increase in the last interval vs an identical interval halfway through.
Does this mean that AT advanced me too quickly? I find it hard to answer the survey questions for these long Z2 rides.
More information about aerobic decoupling (see also bunch of topics on this forum).
TL;DR: aim for <5% during steady Z2 2h ride or even better, for your usual ride duration if it is longer than 2h. And to set some expectations: as mediocre beginner, it took me 2 base seasons to get around 0%.
Thanks. So I should interpret my highish variability not as indicating I should do easier z2 workouts, but more as an indication that I’m probably still extracting improvements that will be revealed as better HRV in future seasons?
I have followed some of the HRV discussions in the past, but had not thought about it for long Z2 rides until now.
This isn’t what HRV is, this is what’s known as aerobic decoupling or HR drift.
HRV is the variation in time between heart beats. If your HR is 60bpm that doesn’t mean your heart beats every second. It might be 0.95,1.1,0.92,1.03… and that variation is your HRV.
Aerobic decoupling is % difference in your avg HR for the first half vs the second half of your ride (usually excluding warm up and cool down).
7-8% isn’t huge. decoupling usually just shows that you have fatigued your slow twitch muscles and are now recruiting your faster twitch muscles that are less efficient and thus require more O2 for the same power.
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Yep, what @mwglow15 said.
It is nice metric to keep eye on to understand if you have good base. If you’re intervals.icu user, then it calculates it for you (Activities → Activity Power):
But pay not too much attention continuously: just follow your training plan and this metric will improve over time. Haven’t thought it earlier but it might be good variable to decide which experience level to choose with TR Plan Builder (>5% Beginner/Intermediate as more base is beneficial, <5% next levels to focus more on building) 
Thanks for clarification. I’d noticed a distinction for HRV before but had not quit grok’d. Continuing with my plan to incrementally bump WL on Sunday Z2 rides until they impact Tuesday high intensity workouts.