Duration Swing

Quoted post said:

...Is there a sweet spot to duration?...

I definitely think there's a 'sweet spot' in terms of both time and intensity. From a duration standpoint I think of the sweet spot as the longest ride that allows me to both ride the target intensity and allows me to recover quickly enough to stay on track for subsequent training.

Outdoors that might be hour and a half to four plus hour rides depending on the target intensity but rarely longer if I have subsequent training days planned. Indoors I'm with you, I might be able to force myself to ride two or more hours on the trainer but the risk is burning out completely on indoor training and skipping subsequent sessions. Limiting indoor training to an hour and a half seems to make it easier to get back on the trainer the following day.

So yeah, if you think of Sweet Spot in the general terms of a training strategy that gives you a good balance of time and intensity and lets you rack up a lot of quality time on the bike then it's easy to think of that in terms of both duration and intensity. The key is to think both in terms of the duration that lets you maintain appropriate intensity during the session at hand and also allows you to stay on plan and train on subsequent days, weeks or months. Pushing either time or intensity to the point that either of those suffer and you can do more harm than good.

-Dave