Originally Posted by
Carbonfiberboy
Good luck. Do you know your FTP? If not and no power meter, how do you know how hard to go? Good for you for being able to pedal 120.
I'm more in the Eddy Merckx camp: "Ride lots." If one rides say 100-150 miles/week with about 50' of elevation gain/mile, you're a fit cyclist, good enough to do anything you want. I don't ride a MUP unless it's the only way to get from A to B. But then I don't live in a big city, just 100,000 people. In winter I do more intervals on my resistance rollers, almost all aerobic, and more like 100 miles/week total. I never really enjoyed intervals until I got a power meter. I do a lot more of that type of thing now.
An hour/day like you're doing is great. Doing something much longer on the weekends is a very good thing, a totally different experience.
Thank you! And....Great question, and I know it will sound absurd, but I just deliberately get my speed up then go full-bore, *alls to the wall, as hard as I can. Where my effort is so complete I’m fading hard at 30 seconds. It took me a few tries to realize the difference between going as hard as I can for one one or 2 minutes vs for 30 seconds. It’s a big difference and a cool experience.
I do realize that, especially in this day and age, I sound ridiculous, but I did see a YouTube vid with a guy, I think his name is The Vegan Cyclist, and he stresses that you really need a power meter/metrics for intervals *but, if you don’t have one, you can do “super high intensity intervals” of 40 or 30 seconds and it’s legit.
Here it is, he says it at 1:40
Now, I know that to do this right, Ill need the right gear and it would be cool to see the numbers. But, at my stage, I’m definitely seeing the gains since my baseline was so low. Especially relative to the way I was cycling before.
And, yes, I am looking forward to doing some nice longer rides this year as well. Got the cycling bug for sure now ; )