Originally Posted by RChung

I occasionally wonder exactly the opposite thing: whether regularly spaced hard efforts properly mimic the demands of riding in the hills, or racing.

In an attenuated way, I sorta kinda have a dog in this fight, though the dog is small and not very loud. My main research area over the years has been particular types of renewal theory. A simple way to explain renewal theory is that it describes how you use things up and how they get renewed or replenished. So that's one way to think about energy expenditure and renewal during cycling.