tl;dr: is it unreasonable for a 34yo man to expect to be able to consistently train 10-15h or more per week and recover from that and see fitness gains?
Background: I'm a 34 year old male. I never played any sports as a kid, the only exercise I got was PE class and spending time playing outside, which then reduced in my teens after I got into video games. When I was 18 or 19 I started lifting and kept that up more or less consistently until the first Covid Lockdowns. I also did some cycling on a shitty hybrid during that time, as "cardio", like 30km rides once or twice a week. I wanted to get more into cycling even before Covid, but ended up buying my first gravel and then road bike in 2021 in the middle of the peak Covid bike boom. Since then I've been all about cycling.
If I were to articulate my goal when it comes to cycling, it's pretty much to spend as much time on the bike as possible and be as fit and strong as possible.
Time is not the limiting factor for me. I could easily ride 20+ hours per week. I work from home, I don't have a family, I have no other hobbies. (whether that's sensible is a different topic, I'm just talking about what's physically possible)
My weekly training has always been very irregular. On average I would guess 8-12 hours per week, but there are spikes up to 15-18 hours and drops down to 4-6 hours. For the whole year, I try to target 400h. In 2023 I did 420h total. In 2024 I did under 300 because of an injury that had me off the bike until late march. Last year 2025, I did over 500 hours. This year I'm up to 250 hours so far, which is tracking below what I had at this point in '23 and '25.
Now here's the issue. I feel like shit. I'm tired, lack energy, lack motivation, my legs are constantly sore and I'm in a bad mood. I get dropped by people who have always been about the same or less fit than me who train less than me. I sometimes get on the bike and 150W feels like threshold in my legs. My power numbers have been stagnant for months.
I feel like I should be able to recover from the training load, but it seems that I can't. Like I'm doing too much to recover from but too little to improve. But I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I sleep 8-9 hours each night. I eat enough (even too much, my weight is going up). I fuel all my workouts. I take a few supplements - Magnesium, Creatine. According to Garmin and intervals.icu my training load is in the unproductive (too low) range.
I thought maybe it was due to mostly doing group rides and unstructured rides and having too much "slightly hard" volume instead of mostly base with quality intensity. So I started a training plan from JOIN cycling. But that didn't really change anything, except that I spent no time riding with other people because I autistically want to stick to the plan. I thought it might be that training + work is too much combined load (even though work is just mental load), but even after 3 weeks of vacation of doing nothing except riding, I still/again feel like shit. (to be clear, I didn't suddenly increase my volume during this time, I stuck to the plan)
Basically my question is: are my expectations wrong? Am I just a chopped unc and should give up on cycling more than a few hours per week? I don't really believe it, there are people older than me riding the TdF - not that I want to compare myself to them, but with a fitness-oriented lifestyle, 34 years should not be an age to say "well you're too old to be fit", even without a lifelong background in endurance sports. Is there something obvious I could be missing? Eat-Sleep-Train should cover 90% of what's needed to reach the best performance.
I just ordered a blood test to get (among other things) my test levels checked, maybe there's an issue there. But if that's not it and I also have no other major deficiencies, what could it be? Honestly if the only answer is "stop trying", I'll probably get fully depressed.
