[photojosh]

A few years back when I was looking at Tour de France stats, IIRC a lot (most?) of those guys spend all day around 120 bpm too. The difference is that they are putting out pretty much twice the power that I do for that same effort.

And probably you too, given I have a hill around the same size on my commute that takes me around 7 minutes too.

[taeric]

https://www.strava.com/segments/622627 is the hill I'm talking about. Agreed that they are likely putting in much more power than I can at that heart rate.

My naive understanding is that I can push more time in higher heart rates and slowly pull up what I can do in the lower ones. That said, I'm just aiming to be consistently in the 6 minute time frame for that hill by next year. As things are, I'm quite winded if I hit the low 7 minute time frame. So, trying to pay attention to any methods I could use to make that better.

[photojosh]

Yep, just a little steeper than mine: https://www.strava.com/segments/623328

AFAIK your 'naive' understanding is pretty right on. I subscribe to the philosophy of spending as much time as possible in the "sweet spot" (search on that term), which is toned down just a bit from the best effort you can do in an hour.

[bitexploder]

Yep. Cycling has some different terminology, but the basics of zone training are the same. How much time per zone, intervals, training cycles, it all works the same in terms of adaptation.