Totally a guess, but I wonder if compliance plummets when they try to schedule those extremely long intervals. Especially when so many plans assume you’re training outdoors. It’s hard to find a route that’s going to give you 30+ mins for one interval. Fascat does assign some rides that have instructions like “Do a ride with as much SS as possible until you reach X TSS”.
Here’s the kind I was talking about
125 TSS: Zones 2 - Sweet Spot
Ride till you achieve a TSS of 125- this should take 100- 140 minutes depending on how hard you ride/how tired or not you are
That makes sense, I don’t have many roads for 30 minutes plus TIZ workouts either .
I recently realized that turning around on a segment doesn’t affect the overall workout, IMO.
So if you have a 15 minute segment you could turn around 2 times for “ 45 “ minutes. It is boring going back and forth and I don’t think many people think it’s allowed, it’s like taking a ±20 second break in the interval. Once I started doing it that way it made planning my rides for long sustained efforts easier.
I did it just today. I wouldn’t take those breaks in a VO2 interval, but anything else and I’m fine with 15 second uturns.
Yea of course, I wasn’t meaning anything but tempo, SS and threshold. Even threshold I wouldn’t try to take anny breaks unless I’m doing the kolie test or “hour of power” type workout.
Yeah, my best road for the KM test is about 10 mins long. It crushes my soul every time I do that uturn 
Truth be told though, it doesn’t really matter. I can always add or subtract a watt on my FTP if it really bothers me.
Yeah, this is why I’m more focused on multiple, longer intervals rather than trying to push out a 1x60 or 1x75 or something like that. Being able to do something like a 3x30 with a short rest is way more applicable to the kind of riding I actually do, since I’m either riding up or down most of the time.
Along these lines, has anyone found a good way to track TiZ for SST on a Garmin? I’ve got time in zone tracking for the various zones on one screen that I use as a rough guide, but I haven’t been able to find something I could set up specifically to track it throughout a ride that’s more flexible than just using the lap button.
Sorry if I’m being thick, but I don’t understand what you’re saying here. You are using the Time in Zone field to track time in zone but that’s not what you want?
He probably is having issues because sweet spot isn’t a real zone, so tracking time in it is quite tricky.
Yeah, this is the issue, sorry I wasn’t clear. I keep an eye on Zones 3 and 4, but was thinking specifically in terms of tracking how much time was actually spent in Sweet Spot rather than the zones it straddles. I’m thinking of this in terms of something like those Fascat workouts where they say to spend 50-60 minutes in Sweet Spot, for example.
So something like this, basically:
This is a fantastic question. I honestly can’t believe I never thought of it. I’m now wondering if I used to know and have forgotten.
Right? it seems like something that should just be up in the Connect IQ store already considering how much time cyclists spend talking about Sweet Spot, but there’s almost nothing apart from the native Time in Zone data fields.
I haven’t tried it but this might work. Says you can hard code custom zones
https://apps.garmin.com/apps/80380729-6ef6-4446-b588-c443ee53227f?tid=2
alright, just did 2x45@90%. (one 5min break) What’s next?! 
A medal. And a large snack.
Out of curiosity, what was your progression to get to a 3x40?
I was a bit time constrained during the week, so I had to save the big sweetspot rides for the weekend. I’m not saying this is the right way to do it but I worked for me, and threshold/sweetspot should be working toward similar adaptations.
I came off a 2 week VO2 block, and tried to get in as much endurance as I could. Ending up around 10 hrs/wk. The harder workouts were:
Wk 1: 3x10 Threshold, 4x25 SS 90%
Wk 2: 3x12 Threshold, big endurance day because of suprise nice weather
Wk 3: 2x20 Threshold, 3x30 SS 94%
Wk 4: poorly timed recovery and outdoor endurance
Wk 5: bit of rest early in the week, 3x40 SS 90%
progression is going longer, so just go long and don’t sell yourself short…
3 MMP average power curves:
- early March “baseline”
- early April
- early May
And 1 “MMNP” (mean max normalized power) curve for early May.
March I pushed UP threshold power under 30 minutes. April I pushed OUT threshold power to around an hour.
You don’t need to get caught up on the details of progressions. It’s a lot easier that way, yet still requires a lot of hard work and more importantly REST to drive super compensation and ADAPTATIONS. I literally went from 2x20-ish directly to ~60 minutes and beyond.
assuming MMP stands for “mean max power”
yes, “mean max power” is MMP. Those are 90-day curves, so within each 90 day window it finds the max power at every duration.
The movement of the April and May curves are from longer TT efforts. The actual work to build up capacity were under those TT efforts.
My basic summary is:
- build a base of fitness by focusing on longer aerobic efforts
- build up capacity within a week to repeat “longer” efforts and balance with recovery, and don’t overdo the interval work its possible to increase capacity without always doing intervals
- when FTP goes up, don’t reduce time-in-zone (basically the opposite of what TR does with workout levels when your ftp goes up)
- after establishing a strong base of fitness, push up (intensive) and then out again (extensive)
- threshold efforts (I’d include 92-94% “sweet spot” here) are potent when combined with just riding around
Thats worked for me. Your mileage may vary.