Edit: as previously said - these are around threshold intervals.
I think the moral of the story is to not let intensity wane during the winter. Keep it going once a week.
Totally agree. I don’t know where the whole “Z2 means ONLY Z2” thing started, but I’ve never seen it actually recommended by the “influencer” coaches. It’s like something got bastardized so many times that people started to believe it was reality. Places like GCN with their attention grabbing clickbait headlines deserve at least some of the blame for this.
I think old school european training was tooling around in zone 1/2 though keeping volume high.
I believe that lactate levels are more individual than many people think. Similar to HR, lactate figures can vary from one athlete to the next. What’s important is knowing where the major changes take place and noting them to calibrate LT1 & LT2.
While that’s true, they were also riding all day in something like a 44x21 at the easiest, so it’s not like they were just lightly spinning uphill.
It’s really hard to know how it really was. Soft pedaling in the small chainring was what you read. It seems like it depends on geography.
Back in the day, I lived in California where you’d find significant hills in every direction so even an “easy” ride would be multiple 2-4-6 minute efforts at at least sweet speed and a couple unintended vo2 max efforts because the hill was so steep.
Now you have the influencers on smart trainers saying that they ride 3 hours per week of zone 2. They aren’t talking to performance oriented riders but their message certainly filters over to a forum like this one or r/velo on reddit which is supposed to be racing oriented.