distance vs time

[Eden]

All of my training (and I have a coach) has been time/hr based. (If I had a power meter it would be time/power based).

This is my understanding of off season base training.

If you are a beginner you want to keep your base mileage pretty easy - a lot of people feel frustrated that they can't go faster during base building - but keep most of your riding in Zones 1/2 (hr zones that is) A little zone 3 won't hurt you, but definitely try to stay out of 4 & 5. Rides generally from 1/2 hour to 3 hours, with the longer rides being once to twice a week.

If you already have a season of that kind of base building behind you, add more Zone 3, some Zone 4, but still try to stay out of 5. There will be more hours in this phase, but since I don't have my full training plan yet, I'm not sure how much longer the individual rides will be - If I recall right, we added about 100 more hours to my training year. We are going to have a team weekend workout (which will be part of my training plan) that I know will be getting up to 70-80 mile training rides, so that makes me think that I'll be looking at 3 1/2 to 4 hours rides towards the end.

(note that I'm not trainining for a century, I'm training to race and for the most part our races are around 60 miles, so we don't do a lot of rides over race length - if you are training for century riding, Ironman, or randoneurring you might want to up the saddle time more towards the end of your base phase, but still taking it easy)