Originally Posted by
Sy Reene
These arguments always finally end up with discussion on the semantics of 'training' . A structured training plan that's based on time/effort is all fine and good, if you can manage to identify a route that finishes exactly where you need to finish -- eg. at your car or your home, or you have a support vehicle following that you get in when you're done. Otherwise, you're walking (home or to the car, etc)? Then there are group rides, some might be called training rides. Eg. a local club around here does morning training laps around Central Park -- 4 of them or roughly 24 miles or so. Therefore, it's a fixed distance. Group/club rides are often used in training, but not aware of many of them stopping in the middle of nowhere because someone's stopwatch had counted down to zero.
I think it's easier than you're indicating. For example, I'm going to head out for 3.5 hours later with just a couple VO2 max level efforts on certain longer climbs. The climbs are long enough such that I'll back off the gas before the top. Depending on the route I chose, and the bike, I may have to do an extra lap around the neighborhood, or an extra 5-10 minutes of noodling to get home. That extra noodling is a drop in the bucked compared to the "on" portions of the ride, which is where most of my training adaptations will come from.
Like most people I only have so much time to ride and train, so time and training stress (as a function of power) is how I optimize that for my solo training sessions. My comment was entirely in the context of solo riding. For group riding/racing similar arguments apply, but yeah I agree with you, it becomes more muddled and I think that the bike certainly makes a bigger difference. For this reason I race on a Specialized Venge with latex tubes, deep wheels and all the fast bits, but train on a Giant TCR with box rims that is configured to be a lot more comfortable. It is certainly a slower bike and takes more effort to maintain high speed, but I don't really care about speed in my training, I care about getting stronger with my available time and power output.