70sSanO

The first step you need to do is talk to your doctor about how hard you can push yourself. You also need to wear a heart monitor to keep yourself within a range and be aware when you exceed that range. It will also help you to push yourself a bit if your HR falls off some. You'll also want, at the very least, a computer that will let you track your times and splits. Trying in to Strava, or ???, might be a good thing.

Your should probably start with 15 miles, move to 20 miles and then back to your 25/30 miles at a higher speed. There are all sorts of training methods, but it is a mindset. You want to hit certain splits at certain times, set minimums and, push when you are ahead on your times. Try to set minimums for those days when you just don't have it and refuse to fall below them.

If you have a road bike, you can also cheat, if you are not already. By cheating, I mean riding more miles in the drops. Picking up an extra .5 to 1 mph without doing anything else. Also, taking off weight, if you need to, can also add some speed, with no more effort.

I recently turned 70 and getting speed improvements is not that easy; and each year makes it a bit tougher. Adding a bit of speed an maintaining it may be the best you can do.

Adding miles is another thing. Pushing harder over 30 miles will make pacing yourself going 65 miles easier. But doing hills will help more than anything as you just have to get into a rhythm to where your legs can just keep going.

John

PeteHski

That's not what I meant at all. Maybe I wasn't clear, but I was merely suggesting he does a couple of shorter, higher intensity rides during the week (doesn't have to be full-on HIIT) and a longer, low intensity weekend ride building up to the higher mileage ready for a century. Rather than the OP's idea of doing 6x 1 hour high intensity sessions (which may well kill him!)

Last year he stated that he was riding 3x 2 hr sessions (6 hours total) and I'm suggesting he rides 2x1 hour plus 1x 4 hour (6 hours total). Of course the longer ride may need to start off shorter, but I'm not writing his detailed training plan here. Haven't even mentioned recovery weeks etc. e.g. 2/1 build recovery cycles.

Hermes

Age 73, racing and training 6 to 7 times per week road and track with strength training in the gym. I use a cycling coach and for a couple of weeks used a personal trainer at the gym to tune up my strength training. 6 feet 166 pounds.

I am having the best season this year over the last 10 years of racing and training - faster with more endurance. However, only racing against the clock over a measured course such as the indoor track will indicate the truth. I have to go from general better condition and speed to specific event conditions to actually demonstrate that I am faster in the 2k pursuit or 20km time trial.

Other than you are a youngish 70, I have no idea what you look like on a bike. Weight control and muscle composition are very important especially for longer distances where one burns a lot of kilo joules to complete the event. Lower weight and solid position on the bike burn less Kjoules per mile and therefore generate less fatigue per mile.

It is hard to provide specific advice without knowing you much better. Other posters have provided some great ideas that only you will know will work for you specific objectives. And besides, that, I am not a coach. I just ride these things.

I do not like to ride my bike that much meaning 65 to 100 miles is just too much time on the bike in an odd body posture for me. A 2 to 3 hour training ride is about as much time as I will devote to endurance. And a 20km time trial or 3 mile hill climb race is more than enough for me. That is why I like the track where I can race team sprint, team pursuit and individual pursuit and call it a day.

Today, I am doing a couple of 2 hour plus endurance rides per week and two interval days plus strength training and recovery. One interval day is at the velodrome with my coach under his supervision. This workout is just like a race day since I will typically get teamed with other riders of similar capability that may mean people of similar age or younger.

If I were going to focus on 65+ mile event rides then I would have one longer endurance ride per week and a couple of minimum 2 hour rides. I would have one interval ride per week that would focus on building threshold power such as a 20 minute over under or 5 minute VO2 max. The reason is even for longer events more threshold power is an advantage to improve speed and endurance. You can add anaerobic threshold work such as 90 seconds and rest 5 minutes and repeat for as many times as seems practical for you. There is an interval workout sticky in the racing forum that you can peruse and find something that may work for you.

I do not see any bad ideas here. Because these are just ideas being offered by members with good intentions. You can use your experience to select something that works for you and your current physical condition and ignore any “noise”.

big john

If you want to do 65 mile rides you are going to have to do more than 1 hour rides to prepare. Plus, I think 6 days per week is a bit much at our age, unless you are just noodling around for an hour.

I like to ride 4 times per week with one longish ride, (65+) and one medium, (40+) and the other two 20ish or a mountain bike ride. Sometimes I will add an easy flat ride on Friday to prepare for the long ride Saturday. I haven't done a full century since 2019 but have done several 80+ mile rides. My rides always involve climbing.

I'm 68 and around 200 pounds. I have COPD and have had irregular heart beat. I have back issues, etc. I have no discipline and eat whatever I want. I use no heart monitor or power meter. I don't even have a bike computer. The people I ride with have to wait for me after climbs.

Still, I can always knock out a somewhat hilly 65 mile ride and a couple weeks ago did 77 miles with 5500 feet of climbing. I think the key is consistency. If I slack off for a while the next time I do a hard climb my back hurts a lot. Not to mention struggling late in the ride with climbs.

It all depends on what you want to do. For me, the fun is in doing rides with friends or the club. Rides which are long enough to wear me out but not so long that I can't wait for them to be over. Haven't done a charity ride in a long time, don't know if I ever will again. Sometimes I think about getting an e-bike, but I'm not ready yet.

Carbonfiberboy 

I started doing longer group rides about 25 years ago with riders who were faster than I. After a few years, I wasn't slower anymore. With that history, my training has fallen into a pattern of riding my legs off on a long ride once a week and then just doing moderate rides during the week, usually only an hour or so, but sometimes one longer midweek ride. I work up to one 4 hour weekend ride at maximum pace so that I'm absolutely dead at the end. I'll usually have 45' to an hour of zone 4 and some zone 5 on that ride. I don't need any more intensity per week than that, that's for sure. I don't do intervals, I don't do HIIT, none of that. I just ride my guts out on that one ride. A few months of that, and I'm OK with riding a mountainous 400k with no longer rides. The trick is simply to ride as hard as I can for as long as I can. If I fade before I'm done with my planned ride, I just slow down and finish however I can.

That's a simple plan. Start with shorter rides, say 25-30 miles once a week, ridden as hard as you can. Gradually increase riding time to that 4 hour goal for that one ride. Add midweek rides as one is able. I work up a 10 hour/week total, counting gym time. Most years, I do longer training rides too, up to 10 hours or so, obviously at a slower pace, but with the same goal of being exhausted at the end.

The main trick is to eat enough and stay hydrated so I don't bonk or get dehydrated on these long rides. I've been using a heart rate monitor on every ride for 25 years. If my heart rate gets lower than it should be for my perceived effort, I need to eat more. If it gets too high, I need to drink more. Otherwise I don't worry about what my heart rate is doing, other than to notice what the optimum is in various terrain features, optimum meaning as fast as possible without blowing up and having to slow down. The interesting part of this is figuring out that fast-as-possible pace. If one can still walk at the end, one could have gone harder.

I realize that this is not the conventional training plan which one sees, but it seems to work better than the usual for what I do, which is endurance rides up to 400k.

PeteHski

I'm curious as to what the "usual" is and whether or not you have tried other methods?

I've tried a few training regimes over the years and now starting to favour a more polarized approach. As someone once said "most people make their easy training rides too hard and their hard sessions too easy". I was certainly guilty of the former for a while and I think it can potentially lead to over-training. That would be my main worry with riding flat out every week on longer training rides, finishing totally exhausted. That sounds similar to a race programme. It might improve your form in the short term, but at some point you would fall apart without a break.

I also now follow a 2/1 build/recovery week cycle pretty much all year round. The recovery week consisting of a few easy base rides and one short mid-week session with a bit of intensity to maintain VO2, but not enough to cause any significant fatigue.

Carbonfiberboy 

My reference to "usual" methods meant the sort of thing one sees in downloadable training plans for whatever and cycling training books. There's a somewhat customizable periodized plan which I've used as a reference, looking at the amount of high, middle, and low end as the year headed for my A ride at the end of July. For instance this week there's a total of 1:15 of Z4, split between 2 non-consecutive days, one session of 8 X 1' X 5' max effort, and the rest split between Z1 and Z2, but no ride longer than 1:50. I think that's fairly representative of what one sees for experienced riders.

What I have been doing has no basis in intellectual development, just experience. I rode a lot as a kid and teenager, but that ended with the War and then Career and I didn't ride again until I was in my 50s, when I started riding with a group of folks who were all stronger and faster than I. The focus of this group was long 1-day rides and that became my focus also, so what I do might be limited in application, i.e. I'm no crit or TT racer. I do one ride/week to exhaustion and spend the rest of the week doing active recovery and strength work, so that's mostly Z2 and an hour or two of gym, with some sprints thrown in as I get fit, as more strength work. I use TrainingPeaks with the focus on arriving at the hard ride with a somewhat positive TSB and gradually increasing the weekly total TSS, with some easy weeks thrown in. The easy weeks are somewhat random and provided by the PNW weather or me being too tired to go hard. I used to ride all-out in the winter rain, but I've become more wimpy in my 70s. I watch my HR, and if it doesn't come up normally when I hammer, I back it off and either take it easy or cut it short. I shoot for 45' of Z4 with a little Z5 on the hard ride, with our routes having about 50'/mile, mostly 3-4 hour rides with some up to 7 hours as we approach our A rides.

My experience is that it's necessary to learn to suffer to do long hard rides, gradually increasing the TSS necessary to induce said suffering. The last few years I've been having hard ride TSS around 300, peaking up to 400-500 in the summer. My last A ride in '19 had a 543 TSS.

I tried going Polarized a few years ago, but I wasn't getting enough high end to do well on an occasional local hilly ride. Nothing seems to work as well as doing them. One might think that specificity is key, but what seems to work for what I do is to get the TSS up there by going a lot harder than I will on the event rides, so more TSS/hour in training. I suppose the theory is that doing high end work pulls up all one's zones. That's opposed then to pushing them up from the bottom with more hours. Maybe that's just as good or better, but it takes more time. Maybe just the TSS is the goal, no matter how we do it. We have to experiment on ourselves w/r to our goals.

PeteHski

I've used training plans from Training Peaks, SYSTM (formerly Sufferfest) and most recently Pillar (adaptive software based) all geared toward fast mountainous timed century Sportives/Fondos, A-Race being the L'Etape du Tour. I find they are all pretty similar, with long Z2 weekend rides (building from 2-7 hours max, but mostly in the 3-4 hour range) and shorter, more intense (not necessarily HIIT!) weekday interval sessions. The interesting part is that none of the longer rides (in any of these plans) are intended to be "suffer" rides. So the only time I do suffer on a long ride is during an actual event. But it seems to work okay for me that way since I do a fair few events over the season, so there is plenty of suffering in my overall regime.

Interestingly I was listening to a podcast interview with Geraint Thomas this morning and he was talking about how his coach has changed his training philosophy over the last few years from basically riding flat out to exhaustion and starvation, to a more polarized plan with emphasis on being fresh and recovered ahead of the harder interval sessions and events. Obviously, given his palmares, both approaches can work! What you can say about GT is that his capacity for "suffering" was/is off the charts. In his book about his Tour win he mentioned that his coach told him that there were only 2 riders in the team who could handle his huge training load. I'm sure you can guess who the other rider was! But now they are getting on a bit (in relative terms) maybe they need a slightly different approach to training load? For sure as we get older we need more recovery between hard sessions.

Just thinking aloud really....

Carbonfiberboy 

This is fun. If I could give one piece of advice about "training to increase speed and stamina" it would be "get a tandem and ride it with your SO." My wife loves to ride bikes. She is totally not a strong rider and loves to be in the second seat. She's my secret weapon. We bought our tandem on '07 and started riding it on our group's rides in '09. The first time we took it out for a 20 mile ride in '07, my legs were just destroyed, and I was a randonneur who'd been riding in the mountains for years. We rode RAMROD on it when I was 69. That's how you get strong and it's really simple. The only issue is that your SO has to trust you enough to give up control and most women have little enough control in their lives.

I briefly tried training with Z2 long rides supplemented with shorter intervals on weekdays. Two issues: #1, I'm not strong enough to climb in zone 2 in our hilly terrain, #2, our group rides are social, with friends with whom we've ridden with for many years. Not giving that up. Plus I think when one empties oneself on the road, that increases reserves, both in glycogen and in muscular endurance, just ordinary adaptation. Thus randonneurs do an SR series each year, 200k, 300k, 400k, 600k. From each ride, one acquires adaptations which make the next one possible.

PeteHski

Unfortunately there is no way my wife would ride a tandem with me. She does ride, but generally as far away from me as possible! Tandems are great for drafting on the flat though. It's like being motor-paced!

I have the same problem with our hilly terrain too as it happens, but I can just about manage it with the odd surge into Z3 on the steeper climbs and a little coasting on the steeper descents. I've actually come to really enjoy these easy long rides where I can appreciate the scenery and let my mind wander. On event rides I often miss all that stuff!

There's no doubt in my mind that emptying the tanks on a long hard ride has benefits to stamina, it's just a matter of how often to do it when trying to build fitness. For me it's roughly on a monthly basis, usually during event rides. It's actually quite rare for me to ride full out on a long solo training ride.

Carbonfiberboy 

Oh, the tandem comment wasn't for you particularly, just for the general thread reader.

I had a decent year's riding in '19, pre-pandemic. I've been trying to reproduce my training schedule from that year, but it hasn't been working as well, I thing because, duh, I'm older. In '19 I did 4 hour tandem rides every Sunday and recovered well enough. This year, I'm not recovering as well. I will try your 2/1 approach and every 3rd week schedule a "Wimp" route to be ridden Z2, see if I get any takers, see how that goes.

GhostRider62

For a randonneur with a large chronic training load, 200, 300, 400, 600k progression every 2-3 weeks isn't too damaging but from a training perspective, a better adaptation progression would be more gradual. If a rider has a CTL of say 50 and they do a 400K, they are going to be so deep in the red WRT training stress balance (TSB) that they will lose a week of training whereas a randonneur with a CTL of 100+ might only need two days or less to recover. Age is factor, of course.

I started at zero in early February and did a 200K in late March, driving my TSB to -62.1.... taking almost a week to get back under control. Another 200k seven weeks later, I had a much larger base and rode much, much harder. And, my TSB was "only" at -43.8 after the brevet and the training effect was better. If I was really fit with a huge aerobic base, that last brevet might not even have put me to -25 depending how fresh I was. How much load one can profitably take depends on both how fresh one is and also the level of the aerobic base (CTL).

Personally, I am building back up more slowly than when younger and am seeing results trying to be patient. My CTL is pretty low for me at this time of year, it is in the low 50's. It seems that the combination of age and rebuilding a large base takes longer or at least that is what it seems to me meaning more gradual and slower increases in load, week by week with consistency. ??

Carbonfiberboy 

Getting old sucks, for sure. In '19 I had a CTL of 62 at this time, today it's 50. I try not to get a TSB below -20, try to get a CTL increase of only 3/week, and try to not let my TSB get above +10. But I keep having little set-backs - life interferes or I develop some little problem I don't want to make worse. Three days of steady hard rain is also not good.

OTOH, I had a very good ski season, felt almost youthful legs a couple times. There was a youth downhill race at my area and I was coming down with the racers who were warming up. Lots of racer girls now, wasn't like that 20 years ago. Cool, confident, and very aware.

GhostRider62

My CTL jumped 14 points on the first 200K and 7.5 points after the second one. What I have been trying to do is hold the new level for 3 week including the rest before any increase. Observing sleep, mood, HRV, and just how I feel on the bike. I have not had to turn around after starting a ride but a few times, decided to really take it easy. Kind of frustrating. I'm doing a hilly 400K this weekend jumping from the 200k because 300K is too hard. I am almost fit enough that I won't be able to be smart and restrain myself. It is only 14,000 feet of climbing but it has a lot of stops and starts. Fast twitch in the quads get the snot beat out of them, at least I understand that to be the scientific explanation.

Carbonfiberboy 

Yeah, 14K in a 300 is a lot,10K more doable. There's a often used section for 300s and 600s which has a really steep long hill about 100k from the finish. It's kinda fun to be there when the riders come through, just to see their faces and congratulate oneself on not participating.

I looked back at my event rides and hardest training rides since I got my Garmin. I also have -40 or so TSBs the next day and then take it easy for a couple of weeks, easy enough that my CTL drifts back down a bit. So far, I've never bailed on an event, though I have cut many training rides short. My legs were shot again after Sunday, then did our first day hike of the year on Monday, only 5 miles, did 30' Z1 on the rollers today, felt way better after, and tomorrow will try my first mid-week 50 mile/2500' on my single this year - it's not going to rain!. I'll take it as easy as I can, should be "interesting." TSB is -4 and should drop another 15 points.

GhostRider62

The only event that I DNF'd was due to injury.

I think I am seeing that my "ramp rate" in load is about half what it used to be. I actually considered getting a coach with experience with old athletes because maybe I am being too conservative. Dunno. Last year was a mess with a bad sprain backpacking the AT and then a wreck with 10 broken bones.

My focus is really for August 2023. Once I hopefully get to a solid endurance base (high and comfortable CTL), I think I have to try to hold that thru the Fall and Winter. Or, it might just turn out that I do not have it anymore. It is eye opening how many DNFs there are in the 65-75 year olds at Paris Brest Paris. I can tell I am getting soft. It was raining hard the other day and it was kind of cold (45-48F). I needed a workout and should have ridden but wussed out with all kinds of excuses to myself (I already know how to ride in lousy weather, I am then going to need a big maintenance, I could use some rest, it is dangerous, etc.).

On the positive side, I was able to maintain my aerobic capacity. My 5 minute power is as good as ever. I just fold like a cheap suit after 4 hours.....as expected with a relatively low CTL

BTinNYC 

I think this is the natural thing to do, especially for us beginners, and getting a HRM showed me the delta.

Carbonfiberboy 

I don't think holding a high CTL is a good idea at all, but that depends on what you mean.. For me it's worked best to go hiking in September, then back on the bike, focus on pedaling drills, strength work, and endurance until January, then start ramping up the CTL. See where I am, where I want to be, and divide by the number of weeks. I don't want to hold my A event CTL (70) for more than 2 weeks. OTOH, I never let it go below 50 if I can help it. So I have a narrow spread, between 50 and 70. Maybe that's what you're talking about.

Of course I'm not doing PBP because I know the stats. It would have been fun in my youth when I could go without sleep for days, even in to my 50s would have been fun, but I started serious riding way too late. My best performances were an under 8 hour 200 and an under 15 hour 400, but it only had the gain of a 200. A mountain 400 took me 18.5, but I knew I couldn't do another the next day. Already in m mid-60s, I couldn't recover that well. I'm a day-ride guy. Today's 50 miler went much better than expected. I had to hurry home for lunch, so got a .87 IF.

I should mention that I record and upload everything: walks, runs, gym, hikes, skiing. Everything goes into my CTL. I use a Polar watch off the bike.

PeteHski

The problem I find with CTL is that all stress is not created equally. It works okay for me as a relative parameter, but I don't find that it compares well across different types of training regime. For example I can be far more fatigued off a relatively low CTL if there are a lot of high intensity short efforts involved. I first noticed this a couple of years ago when I moved from a high-volume to mid-volume training plan. My CTL was much lower on the latter plan, but my fatigue and fitness were very similar.

Carbonfiberboy 

Agreed. "There's a flaw in everything." CTL is calculated off TSS, which is calculated off Normalized Power™, and also has a default decay rate, so there's a whole chain of assumptions where B may not be implied by A after all. I've done a 3 hour ride and gotten a TSS of over 300. I happen to have some talent for repeating short hard efforts but a crappy aerobic system. The last couple miles were torture, so the 300 number felt about right. It's complicated. We do the best we can with the information available and more information is better if one knows what to do with it, IMO.

PeteHski

Yeah, you have to work out how to use the numbers on a personal basis. For example I find 100 TSS from a full gas 1 hour effort requires significantly more recovery than 100 TSS from an easy 3 hour ride. To me they are not the equivalent numbers they represent in the "model".

By definition, it should be impossible to generate a TSS of 300 on a 3 hour ride. 100 TSS is supposed to represent an all out 1 hour effort at FTP. So it would just mean that your FTP was set way too low.

GhostRider62

I slept around 18-19 hours on 2019 PBP with total time of 75-76 hours out of the allowed 90 with total moving around 52 hours. I started it at a relatively low CTL of 62 and my TSB was -82 when I finished. In principle, if my CTL was higher as it was in 2015, I'd finish fresher and faster.

For the sake of discussion, let's say I want to have a CTL of 150 in August of 2023. I am at 50 right now and increasing 5% per week. Considering a vacation and a couple rest weeks, it will take me until Labor Day to reach 100. So, that is 700 TSS per week or around 14-16 hours of riding in zone 2 if my back of the envelope estimation is correct. What I am thinking is trying to maintain that 70-75% of that volume.....maybe 10-12 hours per week in Nov-December after a break letting any fatigue drop. Let's say I drop to 70 and then build up to 100-110 over the SR qualification period and then a massive block in late June to 150 CTL than a 2 week taper in August. (I have had my CTL much over 200 inthe past as a point of reference)

The best benchmarks I can find are for marathoners and Triathloners, such as this one. I know that the commercial products cannot predict performance well beyond an hour or two, nor to many coaches understand how to train an athlete for long distances. Couzens does. Every single athlete of his who did his program qualified for Kona. That is incredible. Couzens has a very nice table in this blog giving ranges of fitness needed for various levels.

FTP almost a useless metric for ultra endurance, the fatigue curve is what really matters. Rider's drop power or decay over time to hugely varying degrees. Some might drop 10-12% every doubling of time and a really fit rider might only drop 5% every doubling of time. After 4 hours and two doubllings, the difference can be large and at 8 hours massive. CTL seems to be the best proxy. As an example, I might struggle a lot to ride a 400k or 600k brevet initially with rider with a superior FTP but after 3-4 hours, assuming my endurance is better, we are then equal in terms of relative effort because their power has decayed more than mine. At 10 hours, he is asking me to slow down. Riders fatigue at different rates for many reasons, one primary one is training and the ability to burn fat because long distance is energy limited more than FTP limited. There isn't much information out there for older riders out there. The fatigue constant τf in TrainingPeaks is 7 days by default IIRC. I had found that mine was at least 10 days and probably 12 days, I never figured that out. Age? I had contacted Andrew Coggan asking if that was possible and he said yes but did not explain. Whether the fatigue delayed slower due to age or my volume of training? That constant has a big effect on the CTL and TSB display.

From my experience, the ability to burn fat and the willingness to limit the use of fast twitch muscles during a long event help delay fatigue and is critical on long events. One is training focus and the other is simply not burning matches.

The ability to generate more than 100 TSS per hour on a route with lots of short punchy hills where the rider did a lot of hard anaerobic efforts was shown true in a study. NP>>FTP. The rate of recouping or recycling W' was shown to be quicker than the expenditure rate at certain power levels. I cannot recall but will try to find the studi. I tend to use average power because that is what the rear wheel knows and try not to jam hills too often because short hard efforts definitely screw me up more than the TSB would indicate. XERT tried to model fatigue from different energy systems and it seemed pretty good, there were other issues with their software and after some years, I stopped with them GC is good and free

https://alancouzens.com/blog/benchmarks.html

https://alancouzens.com/endurancecor...atigue-curves/

https://alancouzens.com/endurancecor...fat-oxidation/

Clyde1820

If a 70-something, I'd question the ability to jump right into a 6 days per week regimen. Got to consider the recovery days, particularly if going to be ramping-up the intensity, difficulty and/or mileage to improve the stamina and speed.

In general, I'd suggest: interval training. Back in the day, with distance running, the single greatest means of improvement a group of us ever found was Fartlek-type intervals as a key part of several training runs each week. Took awhile, but the hard work paid off. Surging hard for relatively short periods of time, then backing down to the "base" pace for awhile, then surging again, etc. Done in a cycle throughout the run, it resulted in overall speeds and times improving. Translated to cycling as well, at least in terms of cardio and stamina.

No idea what terrain you deal with, on your cycling routes, but you might also be more selective on the type of terrain you go after. Tougher terrain can force you to put out greater intensity for greater periods of time. If you vary it, in your training, you can have similar benefit of the "speed play" that the Fartlek/interval method creates.

Takes time, as any solid improvements do. But I think you'll like the results.

https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/fartlek-workout-101/

GhostRider62

This wasn't the link I was looking for but it explains many of the shortcomings of W' when considered linear WRT to expenditure and recovery.

https://journals.humankinetics.com/v...icle-p1561.xml

Carbonfiberboy 

Yeah, that's what everybody says. Never did another ride like it. I had 11 TrainigPeaks All-time power records. Avg. power 118w, FTP 161w, avg. Normalized Power™ 161w, weighted avg. power 143w. avg. HR 122, LTHR 133. Short, punchy climbs following a rider who is stronger than I until my legs fell off, luckily only about 2 miles from the end. I could out-sprint anyone who showed up for the ride until my mid-60s, though the youngest riders were in their mid-50s. This was in Feb. of '20, so I was 74. I have my FTP up to 164 now.

See GhostRider62's posts below.