Another minimum effective dose post. This is not about pushing out fatigue resistance to very long durations, which I agree with many on this thread that chasing involves doing some level of 90-min sweet spot intervals. My target events are weekly worlds and 1-3 hour climbs, and late fifties and need more recovery.
Back to minimum effective dose. Based on 2017 my thesis is that 1 long 60-90 minute effort a month will help mentally and possibly physically with developing higher fatigue resistance for my target events. Had a long off-season due to C19 during September 2021. Then in October and November my coach had me do a very easy tempo (about 85%) progression from 48-min to 72-min PER WEEK, adding in bursts in November. Overall volume about 9 hours/week during Oct-Nov. Then December criss-cross intervals and some threshold and above threshold work, haven’t finished looking but at a glance tempo+threshold weekly work was holding around 60-min/week as intensity increased. Right now average volume for the 3.5 months is 8.5 hours/week.
Two weeks ago I did a 10-min pacing effort to establish pace for a field test. Yesterday went out and easily finished a 32-min threshold effort. Could have gone longer but I ran out of daylight and road (had to turn home because of sunset). Didn’t prove it yesterday but based on previous long 50-70 minute efforts it felt like I could have easily done 45 or 60 minutes. Woke up this morning and legs are fine, and this is the end of a 3 week build. Fatigue this week has definitely been building up, and I’m looking forward to a rest week.
Next month I’ll target 50-70 minutes at threshold. Then in March I’ll be back out during weekly worlds and will report back on how well this minimum dose approach ends up supporting those 90 minutes hammerfests.