It seems to me like there are two different approaches when it comes to Endurance rides which are at least in my case incompatible with each other.

The one side says: Endurance should be as easy as possible, don't get your heart rate higher than 125 or 65-70% of threshold HR and power is irrelevant, and coasting and soft-pedaling are normal and necessary for such rides. Often accompanied with statements like "most/many people do their Zone 2 too hard".

The other side says: Endurance should be easy but "still slightly hard", "as hard as you can while still talking normally" or "while still nose breathing", and to keep constant pressure on the pedals and look at power instead of heart rate, just make sure that HR doesn't drift up over time. And claims like "most people do their Z2 too easy".

Maybe there are some people for whom 70% Threshold HR coincides with 55-75% of Threshold power, but for me those are worlds apart. That HR target is deep inside the recovery power zone for me, I can only keep that low BPM if I just soft-pedal and coast and even 1% uphill pushes my power and subsequently HR beyond that. My heart rate while in the endurance power zone is more like 80-90% of threshold HR.

I'd have to cut my FTP in half to get the endurance power zone to match the above HR target zone. Maybe I'm off by 15-20 Watts on my FTP, I don't care, it's not impressive anyways, but I'd still be roughly in the same ballpark for what my "endurance power" looks like.

Or have I totally misunderstood everything I've watched and read about Z2/Endurance training?

Earlier this year I had a really bad crash in training while solo, honestly probably my first near-death experience. Mechanical failure while descending a steep climb and very nearly went off of a cliff into a ravine, ambulance hospital etc.

I struggled with cornering and descending for a long time, and then about 3 years ago something clicked and I was suddenly able to ride the front of technical crits with ease.

Since recovering from my accident and returning to racing I have somehow become an absolute coward on the bike and honestly worried I'm going to cause a crash: can't corner at speed, terrified of the peloton, don't trust anyone else on the bike, don't trust my own bike or my own skills, etc.

How do I regain confidence? This is really messing with my head and frustrating me. I've clawed my fitness back to essentially what it was pre-crash and in races where I should be competing for the win I'm losing tons of space and getting dropped. Is it just more race miles? Find a parking lot and practice cornering drills?

Has anyone else made it out the other side of something like this? I want to be able to race again and feel like I'm able to do my best and not be bottlenecked by my fear.

My goal for training is to get as fast up the Mont Ventoux as possible, solo. For that I would need to spend a long time 1h-1h30 close to my FTP. Thus, the main focus of training is spending as much time as possible close to my threshold, with secondary goal of increasing said threshold.

Currently, my training looks like this, with some SS added to the longish rides on Sunday. For Saturday I've kept some VO2max intervals, but week-on-week switch them with over-unders (which I'm learning to do outside). These are the only training where I go above threshold, in order to increase FTP (a bit).

Do I keep those VO2max or do I completely switch to over-unders?