I’d agree with this, easily riding around 3 or 4 hours at the upper z2 takes its toll and especially if you expect to knocking out very intense workouts either side of them.
In isolation maybe, as part of plan for someone on limited hours that includes regular hard workouts, definitely not easy.
You constantly hear this narrative from a few here and its nonsense.
Statements like if you cant ride 3 * 20 @ FTP then your ftp is overstated.
This is a great point. .75 IF for 15 hours a week can be pretty tough to do week after week, usually leading to some pretty deep fatigue and takes away from ability to do intervals. Sure, go do a 3-4 hour ride at .75 3-4x a month, but day in and day out .55-.65 IF is much more sustainable.
Yep, but then I ride ultra distance, where 15 hours is small potatoes when it comes to event duration.
Hehe, ok. That is another ballpark ;-).
Should be great when you have endurance like that ;-).
After months of training, now I can do 281W for 90 mins (Tempo) - I think I can do longer but have to gradually increasing. (The load is high for my fitness now)
Fatmax from last year test was 158 bpm. Today’s ride mainset is avg 161 bpm.
Even HR is higher but I’m feeling better. 2-3 years ago 280W was my FTP. Now Garmin detected current FTP 324W but maybe already higher because I did not do 20 mins intervals much.
^^
So I am just curious for those that do an endurance ride and end on a ~15-20 second sprint…have you noticed extra fatigue carrying to your next session? Or is that just like nothing?
I do remember ISM saying he ends a lot of his endurance rides with a sprint.
This isnt talking about at the end, as far as I can tell… it is saying you can sprint for a sign or go deep on a steep little roller throughout a session and it makes no difference to the endurance benefits/intent. Which coaches have known for decades.
oh man. i’m somewhat new to cycling (~2 years) and ISM got into my head early. so it’s gonna be hard for me to shift my mindset on this. also Seiler telling a story of watching a high level runner walk up a hill to avoid going too hard.
I guess I’ll just give it a try and see
there’s for sure a few hills on my rides that are painfully boring in Zone 2
Think the key is very short intensity.
Its about energy systems (not the fake TR ones, no real difference between, endurance, tempo, sweetspot, up to threshold, all aerobic)
ATP less than 10 seconds doesnt impact on endurance. The study seems to support this.
It you are climbing for 20 seconds plus you need to back off… a spike or two on 10-20% pitches for 10 seconds or less is fine imo.
*numbers quoted just approximate for a sense of reality
What’s missing there is that is probably an elite level athlete, training 20+ hours a week and being really good at auto-regulating.
Seiler has often been illustrating that top athletes do hard / easy and leave enough in the tank for the next hard session. Many amateurs tend to ride a lot of tempo and chase every city limit sprint on a ride with their friends and are often always tired.
Not sure about the study title, they never define what the main goal of endurance ride is.
The idea from san Millan is that long endurance promotes mitochondria fusion, and vo2Max promotes fission. Short intense efforts (15-20s max) do not put strain on mitochondria as the spikes are short (oxygen need and ROS production).
The paper does not study this at all, especially with the pre and post 3 min max efforts that are the exact opposite of what San Millan recommends during endurance rides.
I suspect this is due to
Myoglobin in the muscle cell functioning as an oxygen-store at the beginning of each short interval, reducing anaerobic glycolysis and lactate build-up.
Discovered back in 1960 by Åstrand
Combined with the ATP-PC system.
this study says 3 minutes all out, right? they are talking about more than a spike here I believe.
Yes you are correct.
I was more talking around the general point of “ruining” Z2 than directly towards the paper. My first response was to your question about a 20-30s sprint.
I am really not sure about the point of the paper. I cannot read the whole paper so I’m not going to spend anytime trying to figure it out.
I wouldn’t call 3 minutes an ‘all out a sprint’… as typical spint last seconds not minutes.
All out 3 minutes is more a VO2max effort, sounds like a strange study.
It is very odd.
ok got it
thank you!
