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I'm a 46 year old male. I mountain bike pretty hard at least one day a week. I've been doing High Intensity Interval Training off and on for the last year and it's really improved my Vo2Max (which is my #1 constraint when mountain biking).
Up til now I've done about 10m/day about 5 or 6 days a week plus one hard 1.5 to 2h ride with folks much faster than me.
I'm considering changing things up, maybe resting every other day but doubling the amount of HIIT I'm doing.
Work out harder but less often is likely to lead to improvement. HIIT takes a lot out of you; to be able to do it well - and you need to be able to do it well for it to help you out - you need to be well rested. If you are doing it every day, you can only work out "kindof hard", not really hard, and kindof hard isn't going to put enough training stress on your system to give you gains.
I have two references that you might find useful. Chris Carmichael has a book titled "The time-crunched cyclist", which is all about training without a lot of time. I'd also recommend you look at Joe Friel's blog; he has been writing a lot recently about training for older cyclist.
