I love these threads.
They’re like a guilty pleasure.
Seriously, next time one of these goes off I am actually going to make popcorn.
Noooooooo
This is my entertainment 
I stopped posting and actually made popcorn and mixed up some bags of malto/fructose/sodium. It is still raining outside so I’m off to put the bike on the trainer for an hour spin, in ZONE 2, before my big long slow distance (LSD) ride with Timothy Leary and his band of merry pranksters
but in these here parts of the interwebs, we aren’t slaves to fitness trends and instead call today’s workout ENDURANCE and tomorrow’s group ride is ENDURANCE too.
bwa ha ha ha
It’s not one hour…
Based on the average TR user, it’s probably closer to 38mins.
Drops grenade…
I’ve lost track of what the debate is here. Or if there is one.
Somewhere, somehow we’re all being laughed at.
Friday free for all. It’ll get better when the rest of the Northern hemisphere is riding outside again.
Truth.
The Aussies have to believe in cabin-fever induced dementia at this point.
I wasn’t going to keep posting but I have to say it’s not reasonable to expect to hit MHR. It feels bad and hitting it might make you throw up and can only be sustained for a few seconds which is why the ftp zones are under max hr.
I’m out
Dont tell anyone but I believe the above is accurate.
Ha!
Kudos!, While your improvements seem to be real, this time of the year is mostly an indicator of who has out put the work in the off-season. So there’s a bit of a confounding factor when comparing to others.
ISM podcast bingo:
“My friend\colleague\mentor George Brooks”
“That’s a really good question”
“That’s a really great question”
The winner is actually: “…and thank you for asking”.
Back on topic, Gordo Byrn tries ISM style with lactate testing:
No warmup, hmm.
FWIW I ‘let the power come to me’ and after 30 minute warmup will consistently see negative split. Here is 68 uninterrupted minutes last week, as part of a 2 hour workout with 100 minutes at endurance pace.
WKO fits a regression line to the data, power (yellow line) goes up +22W and HR only goes up +3bpm, for a negative -5.7% aerobic decoupling. Or said another way, after my warmup at minute 30 I’m averaging around 175W / 138bpm and after 68 minutes its 200W / 140bpm. Roughly. That one had some traffic interruptions early and late, so I pulled out 68 uninterrupted minutes out of a 100 minute endurance interval.
Every Tueday, week after week.
No idea what’s going on with lactate, but what I feel and see in power/HR seems to align with his slow drop in lactate over 2 hours:
That is the endurance work I do 5 days a week, with 2 dedicated sessions a week. But the weekend session is more freeform and harder to extract clean data. Doing that consistently on 8-12 hour weeks.
Back in late 2019 and early 2020, I tried lowering endurance to 55-60% ftp and it only made me better at riding slow. Now its 66-79% with the last third usually around 72%. I’ve field tested that HR, its a pretty good proxy for a challenging but ‘all day HR.’
Everyone has to find what works for them.
Same observation but I suspect simple thing as volume. If my z2 is limited by 2h, 0.7-0.75 IF is beneficial. If my rides are over 3h this takes it’s toll in overall training, and lowering intensity does the thing. Basically traditional intensity/volume situation and providing good enough stimulus. On the other spectrum of my observations - check out @AlexWild recent training - there is no mercy! 
I think you are right, I wonder if it’s just the increased volume most of the anecdotal increases are from.
I’ve just done three days of set it and forget it “Z2/LT1/Low Tempo” training. 4:50, 3:10, 2:15 all pretty much bang on.
It’s a great training stimulus, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t feel that different to if I’d done 2hrs at 90% and the rest at 65%.
My RHR and HRV are definitely showing me as being fresher, but Garmin now says I’m detraining so 
Volume matters, I’m sure of it. But I’m consistently at 8-12 hours a week. Last week was almost 12 hours, did a long easy ride on Saturday. 5 hours at 65% IF for most of it, then a long fast downhill and rest stop so IF dropped to 63% by end. No additional fatigue on Sunday, no additional fatigue on Monday, nailing all my workouts this week and raising endurance targets a bit. However I’m feeling a recent fitness bump, so not too surprising.
That’s fair, and that’s a legitimate reason to use Z2 training.
There’s also many factors that could impact as well including diet, sleep, other stress etc.
Absolutely, increases in volume usually require an increase in lower intensity riding. It gets super hard, I think, to control for the different variables. Especially in anecdotal evidence.
Yeah, wish I was younger, I can do that, but can’t do that consistently. My perspective is that I have a limited “recovery budget” and higher intensity training is taking withdrawals against it. Getting old sucks. Endurance as a first principle has allowed me to consistently raise overall volume and see a lot of gains in aerobic fitness but I’ve only been training for 7 years, no lifetime of base fitness for me.
I can’t remember if it was this thread, or one of the several other pop up posts from the past week, but there was talk about “brittle fitness” from lack of Z2.
I was listening to episodes of the AACC around 112 the last few days and Chad summarises it super well. It’s not that intensity builds brittle fitness, but you have to pick goals that are relevant to the amount of training you can do.