Starting to take road cycling a bit more seriously - Training advice please

[Clint_001]

Hi Chaps,

This year I've been upping my weekly mileage and have got to the point where I've seen some good improvement in my average speed and endurance. I'm managing ~100 miles a week and feeling good for it. Usually around half of that is a long ride at the weekend. However I've been lucky in that up to this point my weekends haven't been too busy, that's about to change with lots of wedding etc coming up.

I can see my weekend cycling window being cut from half a day to a few hours so I'm hoping for some tips for getting the most out of shorter rides (basically how to knacker myself in the most efficient/beneficial way). At the moment I'm thinking.....

1) Multiple reps of a local hills over an hour of so
OR
2) Going to the local cycling track, picking an ambitious average speed and trying to maintain it for a set time
OR
3) Going to the same local track and alternating balls out and slower laps for an hour (interval training I guess)

My target would be to increase my watts/kg in the most time efficient way (have also been trying to improve my eating habits and monitoring my %fat to aid this).

Any tips/suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Clint_001]

Thank you for the quick replies. Sounds like intervals might be the way forward + doing the longer rides when I can.

At the moment I'm training for a 21 laps of Goodwood circuit ride in May and the London to Brighton night ride in July. I've been on longer rides than both of these recently so I know I'll get there, just want to get the best time I can.

I'm also looking at a 100 mile sportive in September, I'm reasonably confident I could do 100 miles now (if I made sure to eat and hydrate properly), but would probably drop a lot of speed towards the end.

 

[Clint_001]

I'm not in a club but ride a couple of times a week in a group of three (similar standard but I'm not the quickest so I do get stretched). I have also ridden in a large group of ~20 a few times which was awesome. That was a group of Texans so I made sure to make EPO jokes at any given opportunity