Long story short, I’m going to have Fridays off through the summer. What’s the best way to adapt my plan to take advantage of the extra time? For reference, I’ve always followed a low volume or medium volume plan to put family first (two young kids) and a fairly demanding job. My latest “check volume” adaptation added an easy 30 minute ride as a fifth training day and slightly extended my weekend endurance ride to 2:15. The duration of my weekend endurance ride has always been limited by family time (I typically start at 5a to be able to pitch in with breakfast). I’m leaning towards changing my long rides to Friday (and doing an hour of hard intervals Saturday or Sunday morning), and progressively extending them from 2-3 hours to 4-5 hours. Thoughts? Looking to get as much out of this newfound availability as possible without over-extending. Current weekly schedule for reference:
If you work up to 4-5 endurance rides on Fridays, will you realistically be able to do an hour of hard intervals the next day? I know I wouldn’t be able to get a quality workout after a big day.
Ask 9 people and you’ll get 10 different answers but I’d vote for just incorporating your hard intervals into a longer ride. Just space them out as the time & terrain allows (ie say ride is 3x20 SS with 5 min recovery between, just do 3 hr ride with a 20’ effort the bottom of the hour, recover for 5’ in z1 before returning to z2 for 35’ before the next one).
Don’t overthink it. Just ride and enjoy.
Hey @kochx137,
Having Fridays off is life-changing! My wife and I have both been off on Fridays for a few years now, and I can’t imagine ever losing the three-day weekend. 
Enjoy the extra free time! 
I’d say that the schedule you’re showing in the image above is likely a really solid starting place for you. Switching the Friday and Saturday workouts around would probably be just fine, and I’d first work on pushing that Tuesday ride up to 60 minutes over time, which might be a good first step if you’re able to. With that being said, we just recommended adding in this fifth workout, so this needs to be done over time, and TR will let you know if we recommend any changes to your plan the next time you use the “Check Volume” feature.
From there, it could be beneficial to get your weekend “Hard Intervals” workout up to 90 minutes before pushing that endurance ride out further. 2+ hours is long enough to get plenty of aerobic stimulus from a single ride.
If you can’t get in more than 1 hour on Saturdays (due to breakfast duty 
), then by all means continue to focus on your Friday endurance work, but as @rhine mentioned, it might not be wise to push that out further than what’s actually productive, espescially if it’s going to impact a key session on Saturday morning.
I like @cmc274’s idea of getting in a longer hard workout on Fridays, too. Getting a good aerobic warmup in before finishing with your intervals and a cooldown is a great form of training stimulus that many believe helps improve your overall durability. This could come in the form of you riding easy for an hour, and then loading up your 1-hour TR hard intervals workout or something similar.
Let me know if this helps! I’m here if you have any questions along the way! 
Happy Friday!