Been on TrainerRoad for about 1.5 months and am loving it. Yesterday morning the AI gave me an increase in ftp, about 10w, and I was excited till I did my ride for the day. It was a Sweet spot at 6.7 with 2 20 min higher range sweet spot intervals.
Crushed me and I could not finish. Ended up stopping 20 min in and doing an achievable SS ride for the remainder of my 1 hour.
Should I have lowered the intensity of the ride I was on or should I be looking for more lower levels productive workouts and replace them temporarily with the stretch ones? What I have determined is that I can stay in sweet spot pretty well for some periods of time, but I need brakes. I need to work up both my muscle endurance as well as cardio for the longer upper sweet spot range. Which is the most effective way to get there while the AI learns what is the right level to help me develop?
I should add I started adding running to my training plan but it is minimal 20 min at MAF range so I don’t think that is adding a lot of extra stress yet.
Were you on really tired legs? What % of FTP was the workout? How far into the interval were you and what was your heart rate at? 20 minutes at sweet spot can be miserable or even impossible on a really bad day, but if you’re ready to train it should never break you.
How did the targets in these intervals compare to prior efforts? For example, if you did 20 mins @ 250W last week and it was fine and couldn’t get through 20 mins @ 260W this week, you might just be tired or underfueled.
I was 90% ftp and my hr was significantly higher than my previous SS workouts. Normally SS has my HR topping off at around 145 or maybe 150… here it got to 163.
Maybe I am jumping to conclusions too quickly. I normally do my training in the morning and this was after work… thought I was ready but maybe it was just a bad day.
Don’t let one frustrating workout get you down or lead you to doubt the process, especially with these factors.
I sit at a desk all day looking at spreadsheets and that’s enough to make a trainer ride feel harder at 6PM vs 6AM or noon for me. If I know I have to push my workout to the evening, I’ve had good luck by making sure to have a good mid-afternoon snack and not worry about adjusting intensity a bit if needed.
As everyone mentioned, don’t sweat this one workout; it could have well been that it was just a bad day and you were tired after work. Also, adding running into the equation 2-3 times a week, even though it’s just 20-minute runs, adds stress that can affect your training especially if you just started incorporating it.
However, I see Adaptive Training has already taken into account that you struggled with that workout to adapt subsequent workouts accordingly. After a few rides, things should normalize to your new FTP level.
I would also suggest keeping in mind how fatigued you’re feeling going into a workout and not being afraid to choose a Workout Alternate or an Endurance ride to spin out the legs for the day. More often than not, it is better to listen to your body, recover, and then come back and crush it!
Could be a bad day. Underfueled, tired etc. Pretty normal thing, see how it will feel in the future.
If 10W was less than 10% of your ftp it could be closer to threshold workout. Even with that you should be just under FTP and it should be perfectly doable. So probable cause is point 1.
If it was over 10% of your total FTP, you could be working over your FTP, and AI was wrong.
Solution: see how following workouts will feel. If it will repeat, case 3 is more than probable.