How long is too long?

lanierb

Question: suppose I'm training to maximize FTP and I do one longish ride per week. How long is too long, to the point of being detrimental to your training? Is it 4 hours, 5 hours, ...? In terms of CTL: 300, 400?

The reason i ask is that I ride once a week with a group that likes to go long and I frequently hit CTLs of 300+ on that ride (and, rarely, much larger).

frenchyge

I don't know if there's such a thing as 'too long' in the sense of hurting your FTP training, but I doubt that 5hr+ rides are really giving a lot of bang for the buck in terms of improving FTP. Another concern would be the amount of recovery time needed from those rides and the potential training that might be lost in the following days.

Does recovery from those rides detract from more FTP-focused training that you might otherwise do?

daveryanwyoming

+1 frenchyge

The recovery part in particular is the reason I didn't do too many real long rides this past season. I did a few, they were fun and since I tend to ride a lot of mid to high Tempo on longer rides they usually led to a minipeak a few days to a week later. The trouble was the big TSS days also required additional recovery days either totally off the bike or rides below desired training levels. So I'd get a big TSS bump with associated ATL and CTL peaks but then I'd lose a few days of quality training while I recovered.

All in all I think I did better with shorter rides focusing on quality and fewer long rides. I had no endurance trouble on the few long rides and even one very long race(~ 10 hours) I did this season so I'm pretty well convinced that you don't absolutely need long training rides to handle long events.

-Dave

lanierb

Recovery is one aspect, but if you go long once a week, your body starts to get used to it so it seems like you're recovering okay. What I'm wondering is whether you're somehow trading off long endurance (the ability to go hard for hours) against speed at shorter distance (<=1hr). That is, is going long actually detrimental to FTP? The reason I ask is that sometimes I feel like the long rides actually make me less fast.

wiredued

Got this from http://www.cyclingforums.com/t-380705-15-2.html by Dr Coggan leader of the Cogganites. It sure seems to be true in training it is hard to stay in the sweet spot after 4 hours.

Q: By extension, do you think it is a waste of time to train longer than 2 hrs?

A: "No. (Although interestingly, Greg Lemond told me on Monday that he thought it was a waste of time to train longer than about 4 h...)"

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frenchyge

The body will adapt to whatever stimulus is provided. There's nothing about riding slow that prevents the body from being able to ride fast *unless* all that slow riding reduces the amount of harder training that is performed, hence my questions about recovery days from your high TSS rides. 300-400 TSS rides would probably mean at least a couple days off for me, which means I've lost the ride day, plus the next couple days, from my available FTP-training time.