I raced at an elite amateur level for about a decade and I never really saw the purpose of those huge zone 2 training blocks. Almost no races were more than fou

I raced at an elite amateur level for about a decade and I never really saw the purpose of those huge zone 2 training blocks. Almost no races were more than four hours long and most were in the one to three hour range. It felt like there was a lot of cargo culting of european pros who had very different requirements given the far longer races they were doing over there. Unless you are an aspiring pro or willing to sacrifice your life to cycling, I tend to think those long z2 blocks are a waste of time. I loved riding, but I found zone 2 rides to be pure drudgery if done more than a few times a month. Hard intervals a few days a week with one or two long rides every week or two are more than enough to race at the cat 1 level (assuming above average VO2 max and if you don't have that no amount of z2 is going to make you competitive anyway). At my peak, my threshold was around 5 W/Kg, ~10 W/Kg for 1 minute and 20+ W/Kg for 5 seconds. My biggest week of training was less than 20 hours and I averaged around 10 hours per week for the years I was racing.