Are you sure about this?
There are hundreds of workouts.
You have complete freedom to arrange them within your week as you please
You have a choice of +1/-1/+2 etc for many many workouts
What would you like to see that isn’t offered?
10 mi TT focus?
You could do worse than:
Base: do two days a week of 2 x 20 at 90% FTP. Start building a threshold base gently. Fill out the rest of the week with a recovery day or two, and then as much low zone 3/high zone 2, or just zone 2, as you have time for, and that does not compromise your SST days.
M – recover
Tues – 2 x 20 SST
Wed – AeT
Thurs – AeT
Fri – recover
Sat – 2 x 20
Sun – long ride
Raise the stakes in the next cycle by bumping the 2 x 20 up to 95-100% FTP
Follow that with a cycle where the two hard days are 2 x 10 or 3 x 10 @ 106-108% FTP. Slightly above what you would hold for a “10”
Follow that with a cycle where you sharpen by doing 4min or 5min intervals at 115%+ FTP
say 16 weeks total. maybe do one more FTP build foundation phase before the 10min and 5min intervals kick in.
Two hard days, two recovery days, three endurance days.
You could do worse.
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They could start with some of the things they actually said they were going to do but didn’t like masters plans or short training camp plans. I’d also think some short 4-6 week specialized blocks (e.g. sprint power) would be nice. And - a “do this in season for X weeks to hold form” plan would be nice too. TR is fine,but they could be better.
Was just about to post something very similar! 2 x 20’ is the staple workout for an awful lot of TTers, and for good reason. 10 mile TT is one of the more straightforward events to train for. It hurts like hell and you can spend a small fortune and/or countless hours chasing ever-decreasing aero savings, but the physiological requirements are relatively simple.
I think the problem is that if you just look at the app and don’t read the blogs or listen to the podcasts then you might think the plans are pretty inflexible. And from a technology perspective you’d be kind of right - you pick a plan, you choose your preferred days for each workout, then that’s it. You can manually add things and move stuff around but the onus is on you to do so, the app doesn’t offer any guidance or suggestions or make it particularly intuitive to adjust the plan. This was me when I first started using TR, I just downloaded the app and dived straight in, and to be honest didn’t get a huge amount out of it.
I don’t think that’s how the plans are intended to be used. Read the articles and listen to the podcasts and there’s a whole ton of guidance out there on how to add to and amend plans, how to fit TR around group rides and races, etc. The calendar features added in the last year or so make it easier to do that. The challenge is how to incorporate more advice/guidance/recommendations on adapting plans into the app itself, plus the tools to do so in a smarter and easier way than adjusting one workout at a time.
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We totally agree @STP; we could certainly be better and we are working on getting there. Masters Plans and Training Camps have been put on the backburner for the moment, but only so that we can build a better set of tools for their execution. We can’t talk details yet, and there is still a LOT of work to be done, but Chad is on the right track:
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New here, just finished my first TR program (SSB1) and this is my first post. I’m excited to see what comes next.
Reading the VO2 booster thread, it would be great if they were a set of specific booster plans (3-4 weeks long maybe) that could be slotted in between the basic plans. Hill, Sprint, VO2 or endurance booster plans for example. I tend to plan one or two A races then randomly jump into completely different events that catch my interest. The ability to do a bit of crash training for those would be great.
I realise this might overlap a bit with the specialty phase a bit I guess, I haven’t gotten that far yet 
.
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You have to build it in calendar yourself but here’s what Coach Chad suggests. I modify this by doing “and” instead of “or” where options are presented.
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Thanks @brenph, I will definitely build the plan as per those suggestions. Another user has an example plan up on the Catch 22 thread as well. There seems to be a good bit of interest in it, an off the shelf plan would be popular I think. I’ll get through SSB2 and then slot it in over Christmas.
I suspect you’re right. With the proper infrastructure creating and maintaining even a large number of plans should be easy. A few lines in a database that populates the website should be all that it takes.
Mike
I’ve been a software engineer for 15 years and I have a postgraduate degree in the field. None of us forum rats cats have any idea how easy or hard any of our feature requests would be for the TR team to design, build, test, ship, and maintain, on a technical or any other level. We don’t know how the existing system is built, we don’t know the team capacity, we don’t know the technical, team, or organizational constraints, we don’t know the priorities. We can make guesses about the technical side based on our own experiences building what we think are similar systems, but since we don’t actually know the TR system, we have no idea if our experience translates.
Make a billion feature requests, fill the forum with feature requests, make them hire a new person just to sift through the feature requests. Drop the editorializing about relative ease.
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10 mile TT for many will be a 20-25 min effort.
SSB I+II follows by general or sustained build is going to work well.
I personally think the 40K specialty plan is too much volume at high intensity for most. Particularly if you are racing weekly or frequently.
When I focus on TTs and do 15-20 events a year here is my “in season” week:
Monday - gym / strength or rest
Tuesday - 5x5 or 4x8
Wednesday - rest
Thursday - 3x12, 2x20, 1x45
Friday - openers
Sat - Race
Sun - long ER / Z2
If you want to peak for an A-Race take four weeks out and do the first three weeks of the build program again and then a taper week.
Don’t overthink it. If you do the base I and II and build you’ll be doing much better than most.
Many folks will do very well with that type of structure for a TT season. I’m talking a 100% focus on doing many TTs in the 15-30 min range. The above is three hard days a week. Modulate as you need for fitness, recovery rates, etc. if you want to specialize for a 40k PR full on peak then follow the TR plan and it will go well.
Also… if focused on 10 mile TT I suggest doing the 20 min FTP tests. Get your brain used to 20 min in the hurt locker.
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Except TR itself says they need a better set of tools.
For example, TrainingPeaks has had a set of tools from the beginning that lets coaches pump out plans easily and TP has had since the get go all the calendar features and data analytics that TR has spent the last year and a half talking about maybe adding sometime in the future.
Clearly there’s another way to do this stuff and clearly TR initially chose a path which is now making it more difficult for them to innovate.
I admire what TR is doing. But one has to knowledge that the platform was originally written simply to run workouts. It was not designed to make it easy to promulgate new plans and it certainly was not designed to have Calendar features and data analytics. They are undergoing a great pivot at this point to change the underlying nature of their platform. Hats off to them. It’s a lot of work and takes a lot of investment in time and resources.
And, I’ve always had the impression they welcomed suggestions for new features. My reading is about 75% of the time they either try to add them or state that they welcome the input and will get to it as part of the development program at some point in the future. TR seems pretty open to and welcoming of suggestions from users
So my guess, entirely off the top of my head and loosely based the existing website UX and hints Nate keeps dropping in the podcast and elsewhere, is that it would take relatively low effort, from a technical perspective, for TR to add more plans. (Designing the content of the plans is obviously more complicated given the promise to “make you faster”, but that’s a Chad problem.) The existing platform showcases dozens of plans, and those plans all have the same basic technical bones. That suggests the plans are all modeled in some sort of standardized way, which would mean that model could also be used to spin up new plans.
They keep not adding more plans, despite many requests from users. To me, that doesn’t say “the TR team has inflexible software”; it says they’ve made an explicit choice to not be TrainingPeaks, to not be a plan factory of every possible plan combination anyone could ever want. TR wants to be smarter, more flexible, more personalized, more effective.
I think (again, off the top of my head and having no knowledge of the existing system) the roadblock is their roadmap (i.e. their priorities anad goals), not their tech. They’ve got tech, they’ve got smart engineers, they know how to churn out the technical scaffolding for a plan that Chad can fill in. That’s not their goal right now. They want to build something better, and that takes more effort.
Taking the fact that a feature request hasn’t been implemented as an indication that it’s too hard for the team to build is not a reasonable leap.
Obviously, this is all speculation, and I could be wrong, and you could be absolutely right. But it doesn’t matter, because my point is that neither of us have anywhere close to enough knowledge of the system to do anything more than speculate. Chiding TR’s dev team for building inflexible software or not adding a line to a database table based on our wild speculation is not a valuable contribution to their process.
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I’d thank you not to call me a forum rat… 
You should have quoted me in full:
I’m am not suggesting that the feature request for additional plans is easy as things stand: Re-building the system from the ground up to support database driven training plans is probably a massive undertaking for TrainerRoad. Obviously, that’s speculation on my part but if you look at where they started, it’s unlikely that they built the functionality from the start.
Mike
Apologies! Forum mouse? Forum cat. Cats are cool? Like “hey that guy’s one cool cat!”
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Not sure what type of forum animal I am.
Mike
There’s the next OT thread…
What is your TR forum spirit animal? 
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Given by my avatar image… 
llama
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Maybe I’m a bull (in a china shop).
Mike
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