I think the erg-mode 3 hr indoor ride is one of the best training rides for a half-iron

Triathlon Forum
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I’ve tried a ton of various workouts for half ironman and olys in the past decade+. Love riding outdoors, I’m in lovely Norcal where I can ride year-round outdoors, easily.

Still, I’m finding that the best, most effective repeatable training ride for half-ironmans (and Olys) for me is the 3-hour steady state erg ride at z2. Yeah, sounds boring as all get out, but I find I can mix up the media (often a show for the first hour, podcast for the 2nd, music and Zwift scenery for the 3rd hr when I’m starting to get tired and need to really focus).

I used to think these wouldn’t be good enough as they obviously don’t have you pushing into your tempo or vo2max levels, but at least for me, it seems that those things get trained more than adequately after these 3hr rides. Did a hillclimb route today, no problems hitting tempo/LT paces when I wanted to.

The key thing about these long indoor rides seems to be the relentlessness of it. No stops, no downhill rests, no lower-intensity ‘rest’ type intervals to recover. Just z2, relentless. But that seems to be where the magic happens, when you get really tired and mentally drained, and your back might be sometimes ever more limiting than your legs because 3hrs in mostly aero in the trainer is hard in itself, but man, get back outdoors and you go faster than ever, mainly because you’re getting SOOO much more z1/rest riding. Just look at your outdoor rides, even the hard ones, and odds are that you spend close to 40% of the ride in z1/rest due to downhills, cruising, etc. I can’t change this ratio outdoors unless I’m brutally focused on stay in the right zone, and that means no riding with friends or buddies, even if they are strong.

I try to stay in aero as much as possible, but honestly, if I can hold like an hour of aero on the trainer, 3hr race day aero is no problem. But if I can hold 2-3 hrs of aero on the trainer, on race I can hold that full low-head ducked position that really gets you aero, for most of the race.

Anyway, just throwing out my n=1 opinion on this type of ride. It’s so good it’s hard for me to justify riding outdoors.

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I like doing 20 min with my road bike on the rollers then 45-75 min on the trainer at Olympic tri effort then another 20 min on the rollers with a few high RPM sprints. Then I am done in 90-120 min total and I find I can go from that in the winter directly to outdoor racing down south somewhere. But once weather is good late April to end of Sep , once a week I ride 90-110km with 1200-1400m vertical and that’s my staple for half’s. I rarely ride indoors in the summer unless I have to ride after dark

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It’s hard for me to stay indoors when it’s lovely out - which is often here in Norcal where I am, and for sure if good friends are riding, I’m going with them.

But that 3 hr long ride is so solid - I do my best climbing/hard efforts after doing these workouts despite not doing much (sometimes any) additional VO2/LT work during the week, these long rides seem to be enough to boost it even more than doing those intervals.

I will add that if I’m doing it right, 1st hour is not really hard, but not a pushover, 2nd hour I’m starting to really work, and 3rd hour I’m often struggling by the end, my head’s out of aero, I can’t watch a show for sure, and my back is pretty sore from the position, and I just want to stop pedaling. But I don’t. I just put the head down and grind it out.

I do make sure though I’ve set the power at a reasonable level - I’ve found if I haven’t done these workouts for awhile, a good starting point is my average (not normalized) power from my last outdoor long ride. It’ll seem really low for the first 15 minutes, but the lack of stops/rest more than makes up for the challenge at hour 3.

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It can be a trap. If you have a good fan setup and ride erg you can overblow your target volume or ramp doing this and end up flunking your more important tough intervals. Just be careful to track that and you’ll be fine.

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If you are looking for some British Humor for the long trainer rides, as I am, then check out on Youtube: Culture Catz: https://www.youtube.com/@culturecatz

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But I think this is again part of why this workout is so good. It’s really hard to really over-do it. Not because it’s easy, it’s absolutely not - it’s for sure harder than most of my 3 hr outdoor rides. But it’s that slow torture that doesn’t instantly reward you with endorphins or any sensation of speed or even the joy of seeing really high VO2-max level power numbers. It’s just you and your low-level yet increasing suffering, hanging in there, but not so long you can really do damage to yourself (we’re not riding for like 8 hrs).

For sure though if you are doing erg-intervals, it can get alluring to keep upping the power and all of a sudden your LT2 intervals are VO2max intensity and your Vo2max are pushing into anaerobic power.

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I see your long erg mode and I raise you a 3hr Zwift pacer bot ride. Now that they’re in 15w increments, it’s easy to find the one you need for the workout you want. And there’s enough variation with the terrain that it more closely mimics race day pacing. Slightly harder uphill, slightly easier downhill. Pick a worse bike to add a few watts or a better bike to subtract.

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That’s good stuff! I"ve done pacer bot rides, they are great!

I just like both the mindlessness of erg mode which is truly relentless, and also I mix up my media during the ride. But yeah, pacer bots work great, I may ‘teleport’ to one midworkout the next time I’m doing my ride.

Great tip!

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I find Zwift so smooth a terrain in simulation mode if you avoid the jungle to meet my zone 2 needs. Sooooo much smoother than outdoors here in Raleigh.

Pair up a little Tempus Fugit with a couple 20min long climbs with decent enough gearing to just go up at low cadence and lower end tempo.

Real races aren’t at identical cadence and effort. Even if there are slight variations. So longer more realistic efforts are needed also. IMO.

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or better yet ride the real race route on rouvy with no ERG. learn when to take hydration/nutrition/etc

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I’ve done that several times.

Honestly erg mode the whole way is better in my opinion. Without it, you likely will let up when it starts getting annoyingly hard. That’s where I find the benefit - grinding it out when you’d otherwise give up.

I was afraid I’d have problems with watt variation and especially harder long climb efforts but I’ve found the opposite - I get significantly better at those as well just by doing the tough erg stuff. Even more than dedicated interval work like 5 x 8 mins.

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ehh for me then would have to be tempo zone. rereading your original post, I make sure to plan most my routes to be non stop riding/coasting, which unfortunately means almost no group rides

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Oh def not tempo zone. You gotta hold it for 3-4 hours. No way that’s tempo during training. Maybe for race day you do tempo power but not for this ride.

It still should be quite hard by the end though. It’s a different kind of fatigue than I really get on outdoor rides since outdoors you can always slow down and even if you are riding steady it’s almost never 3 hours relentless. But it works.

It does feel on the easier side in the first hour.

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Is it a steady the same Z2 watts or does it vary every few minutes?

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1,000% agree And if you want extra magic, try to do it 2x days in a row =)

Out of curiosity, do you hold power or HR constant ?

I ride at whatever power I need to get HR around LT1 at the start, then hold HR there for the rest of the ride. I like to watch the point where HR starts to drift, get farther and farther into the ride, over consecutive weeks

When I can do 3hrs w no drift, I know I’m getting super strong.

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Steady erg-power, not HR in my case. I’ve never tried locking to HR. But on this ride my HR really only rises in the last hour, and not by a lot. For sure it’s not the HR that gets too high, it’s that the legs fatigue first (but the HR does go up slowly by the end.) Again, I thought this might be a problem if I ride outdoors and do hard climbs or other HR-spiking activities, but I’ve found the opposite - with the legs so well trained, I do better on all those hard efforts and they feel much easier outdoors even on the short, hard spiking efforts.

It probably would work too for locking to HR as well, it’ll probably be similar, especially if you’re going 3 hrs with no HR drift. That’s def true if you’re locking to power - if there’s little to no HR drift in 3 hrs, you’re getting good!

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So I’m curious why this is better than a 2hr ride at zone two that has an extra 3x20 minutes at 70.3 race pace mixed in.

I can say that last year, I spent the first 6 weeks of the year sticking with only zone 2 on the bike and one day I was absolutely craving some intensity and just randomly ran a 3x5km at a little faster than half marathon pace and I felt amazing so I decided to enter a marathon that was just in 3 weeks with some race pace prep, and without a single run over 25km in that “sharpening block” I crushed my marathon PR by 20 minutes.

So are you making the argument that long z2 just leaves you so fresh that you can comfortably hammer the intensity later on? That’s some degree the Norwegian method, which admittedly is kinda every other method too, right?

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I think for me it’s that 3-4 hr duration that does the trick for 70.3 races. Don’t get me wrong, 2hr ride with 3 x 20 @ 70.3 race pace is also a really good workout, that I’ve done very similar things many times before, especially if I’m time crunched.

I’m also not making the case that the 3-4hr z2 ride leaves you ‘fresh’ - I’ve found the opposite. It does NOT leave me fresh. It takes a toll on my legs (and arms and back) significantly more than riding outdoors or riding that 2 hr + interval ride does, which makes sense given it’s so long and non-stop compared to either of those. But it’s not so much a toll that you’re destroyed for days after - with this 3 hr ride, if you set the erg too high (which you’ll probably do the first time out as hour one feels almost easy), you’ll be forced to lower it in hour 3 even if you’re trying to hammer it as hard as you can, or stop so many times in hour 3 that you’re effectively lowering the power to the correct hard but not-crushing level.

I’m sure you can make a completely logical argument that doing BOTH types of workouts during the cycle regularly would be great for workouts, not gonna argue with that. I’m just making the case for the 3hr completely steady erg-mode workout, as it’s something pretty much NO coaching plan recommends, probably because most athletes will recoil in horror at the idea of being on a trainer with no variation for that long (it actual does vary your effort ironically, with a big difference between hr 1 and hr 3+), or the difficulty in trying to simulate this type of steady power ride outdoors, which I actually think you almost can’t practically do, not just because of stops/hills, but because it’s too easy outdoors to let up on the pedals in hour 3 when you’re supposed to put your head down, grit your teeth, and hang on as long as you can.

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No I’m saying 3hrs that has 1hr of intervals at 70.3 race pace. The rest at zone 2. Wouldn’t that be better?

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I mean if you think more is always better sure.

I’ve done that one as well, it’s also fine. I do think I do closer to z2+ range on the unbroken 3hr ride as it does get quite hard at the end. No way I could add intervals and maintain the power.

Again more than one way to it but I do think there is a benefit from the ultra steady ride at a slightly higher z2. I’m sure you can tweak both workouts to be similar though.