Im not saying it’s easy for everyone. I’m saying even by your measuring stick, your own training and effort, relatively speaking in that frame it’s not a lot of work. By your own measure. Is this frame of reference escaping you?
Haha you’re not “sharing your training” you’re role-playing as a coach and giving unsolicited advice.
Here is what ChatGPT said about your post:
Fallacy: Hasty Generalization + Anecdotal Fallacy
They’re saying:
“I trained too hard, and I got worse. Now I train easier, and I got better. Therefore, you are probably training too hard too.”
This is a hasty generalization because it draws a broad conclusion about others based solely on their own (n=1) experience. It also leans heavily on the anecdotal fallacy, using personal storytelling instead of data or general principles of training physiology.
Additionally, there’s a contradiction:
They start by saying they’re still training too hard, yet by the end, claim their training is now appropriately moderate, sustainable, and optimized — with results better than ever. This ambiguity weakens the argument and undermines their credibility as someone advising others.
What they’re really doing:
They’re projecting — offering advice to others as a way of processing their own confusion and insecurity around training. That’s fine as a personal reflection, but they’re dressing it up as coaching insight.
Mr Balboni here cracks me up. He’s chalked up my performance to doing light training and being fresh and being mostly anaerobic. But that it’s not very impressive.
Apparently this is just sort of “off the couch” performance for most people.
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I woke up in my fifties, bought a bike, and could do 900+ watt 5-second efforts. No training. In middle school, high school, and college, the short running events in track and field were my weakness. I was a distance runner.
Some people I know have been riding for decades, get a podium finish (or two or three) every year, and can’t hit 900W for 5 seconds. And they train more seriously than I do. For them, hitting those numbers is impossible.
Have a great day.
Yeah man. These figures are pretty easy to attain if you’re just riding consistently. Not like you cracked some wild code. You dont want to see what else chatgpt said LOL. Also, it’s not even like the results are speaking for themselves. This weekend, even with all this freshness, how did you race?
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Completely unrelated to anything above:
Can someone tell me how to permanently block a user, so that all of their comments & input on the forum are hidden, not just direct messages from them ? I can’t figure it out. TIA.
NVM, found it. Deep & sincere ‘Thank You’ to David for including that feature.
‘Aaaahhhh… so much more peaceful now.’ 
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My results are up further in the thread. I see you’ve conveniently not bothered to look. My results were mediocre, it was a hill climb and my focus is flat crits, since that’t he bulk of my season. But it’s made me reconsider my weight.
Where are yours? I seem to remember you bragging about some magic power numbers in some impossible hill climb as part of some mythical race, but that was it.
I also remember asking you about how your performances were around the same time, after asking you about your consistency with your 100% effort training. I don’t think you even responded.
Eagerly awaiting you avoiding being a helpful contributor to this forum.
I had done the same, I don’t know why I continue to torment myself by then looking. I have to learn my lessons the hard way.
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My anecdote, since I’m invested in this thread. In 2023 at the end of a 100k race I was able to do 217 watts for 20 minutes up the final climb. I weigh about 170, so that’s seriously unimpressive:
https://www.strava.com/activities/9770711715/segments/3133133081124291776
My training is a couple of interval sessions a week or hard MTB rides, and lots of endurance rides at 70-75% of FTP.
On Saturday’s race, after nearly 6 hours and 4000kj of racing I caught the 40+ leader on the final climb. I knew I would have to get a good gap because he’d be a good bit faster than me on the 6 mile downhill to the finish. I was able to do 263 watts for 46 minutes up the climb, still nothing impressive but a pretty big improvement over 2023.
https://www.strava.com/activities/14367946888/analysis/20484/23258
Maybe the moral of the story is that how you should train depends on what your goals and the demands of your races are.
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@fabric5000 my sympathies for your wasted time ! 
Nah, I have zero desire to look at posts by users I’ve hidden. Some ppl contribute absolutely zero value. They’re not trying to help anyone learn anything, or share info that might help someone out, etc. They’re just miserable humans spreading their misery, and trying to start conflict for conflict’s sake. The argument is the goal. I don’t get why they do it. Maybe it’s a bedroom thing they’re into, no clue.
Whatever. I don’t give it a second of thought ! Too much living and riding to do !
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Let it go guys, these things sort themselves out.
No need to keep the fire burning.
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Bingo.
That’s an awesome improvement! Based on your training, I think this falls into the popular “durability” “metric.” I put metric in quotes, because there’s not a definition, but there are some protocols that can be used to measure your “durability” one being the percentage of some defined power that you can do when tired vs when fresh. What’s your best 45 minute power look like before this to compare? It’s a nice way to give you some sort of gauge to see how you improve going forward.
Did you do any targeted hard efforts at the end of your long endurance rides? It doesn’t seem to be clear if that’s what helps, or if it’s simply the result of a lot of years of high volume. All the information on this is based on elite vs pro riders, and the pro riders see a lower % loss after putting in big kJs. It could just be genetics, which would make sense as that’s a big part of making it to the pro ranks.
This is a really awesome trait to have, hopefully you can work backwards a bit in your training and see what is helping you develop this.
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We are training a system of faders. Not a system of on/off switches.
Our body’s state changes continuously due to life.
What you think your zones are, may not be accurate on training day. Listen to the signals coming from the body. Learn when to push through and when to hold back. In both cases, what are the benefit or drawback of a wrong decision the coming days.
Holding back may be a lot of things. May be 10Watts down. But it can also be cutting time of intervals or skipping. It can be many things.
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The topic will be closed for a period of time.
I hope you forgive me for beating a dead horse, but something else occurred to me this morning when I was riding. I was doing a little recovery spin, about 150 watts, and was thinking again about how absurdly easy it is, my HR is in the 90s, and I can’t imagine doing this for 2-3 hours would be worthwhile. I wondered if other people that do the super easy Z2 training would have a HR so low, or more precisely such a low % of max HR or LTHR.
fabric5000, I see in your easy rides that your avg HR is about 120 or a bit less at 150 watts. Of course HR varies a lot and I may just run lower than you, so I also checked against the TT you posted above. Looking at the first strava segment from that activity, 7:32 at 355w and 160 bpm, I just happened to do almost the same thing as part of an interval set on Saturday 7:48 at 360w and 162 bpm. So our LTRH and FTP are likely very close, but mine is 25 bpm lower at 150w. My power at 120 bpm is about 220w, which is exactly what I did Wednesday morning for example.
So maybe my “Zone 2” is just a higher % of FTP than some people. I’m not saying that it means my training is correct or better. It might be due to my physiology or total training volume, and who knows maybe my FTP could be higher if I went easier on my easy days. But it does validate to me that I’m not necessarily training too hard despite what every forum post and podcast keeps telling me.
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I’m all about beating dead horses!
For that effort, my heart rate was oddly low. High of 170 for an all out 10 minute effort. I just set a new (recent) HR of 187. I’d typically be about 8-10 beats higher for that sort of effort. It didn’t feel any easier. 
I pay more attention to heart rate drift on the Z2 efforts . I also pay more attention to HR and RPE relative to power on them as well. But RPE is probably the biggest thing I follow here.
But most importantly I’ve done a fair amount of training at higher z2 with similar volumes of higher intensity. It wrecks me. I’m wiped out when I’m not on the bike. I can’t get close to what I should do in training. My race performances suffer. This is ultimately what you need to figure out. Z2, IMO, should be the lowest you can do without impacting fitness. Which might mean Z1. This is given a reasonably high training volume. But again, what is a high volume?
Let’s take our friend @Steve_Balboni for example. This guy sounds like a monster on the bike if his data is to be believed. He’s doing my volume all at a very high intensity. When I was in my 20’s I did half of that and after 6 months I couldn’t look at my bike. So for him, 10 hours probably isnt high volume. I still think he’d be even better at that volume with less intensity. And another level better with slightly more easy volume. But maybe he’s done that and it didn’t work, and this is actually what works for him. Since he just wants to troll us I’ve given up on trying to dig into this with him. But he’s an interesting rider who I wish had a different attitude. And I think illustrative that high volume is also rider specific- both of n time and intensity.
So are you riding too easy, too hard, or just right? It’s easier to ride too hard and rationalize that you’re still going at a reasonable effort. It’s hard to ride too easy. Because truly easy is stupidly slow. Ride at 100 Watts for an hour and then recalibrate easy to that.
After listening to a bunch of podcasts and a couple coaches, my recovery spins are under 100W. Like 80W average and HR around 100-110bpm. On an ftp of +/- 250 and HRmax 170 and LTHR 160.
Some of my young racing friends with 350 ftp are told by their coaches to ride under 150W for 3-5 hours so those aren’t recovery rides.
FWIW, a single digit load (TSS) per hour would be a very, very easy recovery ride. HR would hover around 100bpm (52% of maxHR). If in someone’s slipstream, it can go as low as 75-80bpm.
A low-Z2 ride probably ends up with a load of 30 per hour. HR hovers between 100-115 (terrain dependent) which is 52-59% of maxHR.
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