Hi!
I created a plan for a 100km Ride with kind of +2000m
Does it make sense the plan only contains a 1h of endurance rides on Sunday? That makes me doubt about TR Custom plan Builder
Thanks
I would hope that most anyone here could identify there is an error in that logic. Iād look around for other plans that seem to align more for what you are looking for.
For a 100km ride with 2000m of climbing, I would probably argue that you donāt really need any sort of āspecialā training. You simply need to work on increasing your power and your long ride endurance. Weekend rides should progressively get longer, aside from your cut-back week every 3-4 weeks.
The plans are great for progressively increasing intensity/power and building fitness, but I generally do not agree with them in terms of building the necessary long duration endurance that are ideal for 5+ hr rides. Sure, someone can complete a 5 hr race with a long ride of 2 hrs, but someone who regularly rides 5-6 hr on weekend rides is going to fair much better.
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I did a good bit of research into this last year as a beginner trying to edit a TR plan. I was trying to tailor a plan for a 340km event and I came to the following conclusion:
TR is an indoor training product and is excellent at doing that. Especially at managing progressive overload for your intensity sessions. But do you need more than the low volume intensity? (i doubt it).
It doesnt really cater for longer events specifically (although if you nail intensity that will have a great knock on effect) rather it will focus on FTP, TTE etc. Mainly short duration metrics.
For 5hr events you will also need to manage how you, your diet, your fit and your equipment do over that time so to test that you really have to go out and do 2/ 3/4 hr rides.
To pick a plan I would look at the climbs on this hilly route and if there are all 5mins id go with rolling road race, if 10min-20mins id go with climbing road race and then depending on hrs availible do more zone rides. E.g for me that was 2 more endurance rides on top of LV with 1 of them a min of 2 hrs.
If you dont have the time or arenāt used to 50k + rides build it up. I find the red alerts very good at managing my calendar but just be aware it needs data to be accurate.
If your used to 100km rides just do those at the weekend with 1 short during the week (1.5hrs or so on the trainer if need be) but try to make it a true zone 2 ride. Unless you are very used to the volume IMO you dont need more intensity than the low volume.
There are more returns in doing long zone 2, and nailing the water, salt intake and hitting 60+carbs per hr. Building that up each week until you reach your limit.
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On this item, Iād really target for 100g/hr on intense long duration rides. Depending on power output, actual calorie burns can get 700-800/hr. From what Iāve read, it seems that around 100g/hr or so seems to be about the peak of what a person can digest during high intensity rides.
Yeah but id consider that fairly advanced. To get to 100 you first have to be able to do 60, 70, 80 etc.
Question is, did you specify during āTraining Scheduleā step that you have more time during Sundays?
For me, Plan Builder proposes 2:30:00 Solo Ride by default and it can be configured up to 5h.
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For the first several years, I followed my TR plans pretty much to the T without any extra volume or intensity. My plans are almost always for endurance/longer events, so I found it a bit strange to never have workouts longer than 90 minutes, but I trusted the process. My fitness increased and I performed well at almost all of my events. For me, that confirms that you can do well at long events with low volume plans.
However, I missed doing longer endurance weekend rides and felt like I had more to gain by getting in training rides that were closer in duration to my target event. I started lengthening my weekend rides slowly and have enjoyed it the last few years. The key is to strictly stay within Z1 or Z2 for your extra volume. This is easier said than done, and so many people do this thinking theyāre staying within a conservative zone but end up going way harder than they should (this is a very common topic on the TR podcast). If you go about this in a smart and controlled way, I see no problem with it.
An example of what I often do is this: I typically do my longer weekend workouts on a stretch of shared-use path thatās about 20 minutes away from my house. It allows me to ride for long stretches without stopping. Iāll treat the 20 minutes to the shared-use path as my warm-up, do my workout on the trail, then ride endurance pace back home. That gives me 40 extra minutes of volume without significantly adding to my planās intentions. You can tweak this as necessary, adding or reducing time as needed.
TrainerRoad also now gives you the option to increase your ride length in the calendar and it will adjust accordingly. I havenāt personally tried this yet but plan on doing it once I start my training plan back up in February.
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Doesnāt seem to follow specificity does it? Itās bit like training for a crit and never doing any high intensity.
It suggest 1hr endurance on sunday. I changed it to 1h30 and it marked as Yellow Ligth.
I wouldnt worry about that. Do it and see how it progresses and how you feel. The data will catch up eventually. Yellow lights will likely disapear after a while, if your only doing 3 or 4 hrs a week then i expect you are getting enough time to recover. You might find a structure that yellow lights fall on your rest days etc.
When you are creating the plan in Plan Builder you are able to choose how much time you have available for each day, up to 5 hours. So if you want longer rides on the weekends, put a longer amount of time available. This comes with a caveat ā
If you are new to TR it will be very conservative with how much TSS it doles out at first. So, even if you say you have 3hrs on a Sunday it might only give you a 1hr workout as to not push TSS up to quickly and burn you out. My suggestion would be to go with how you feel, so even if TR gives you a 1hr endurance ride on a Sunday, do a long ride instead. Eventually TR and the AI system will learn and stop engaging yellow/red lights and also actually scheduling the longer rides for you.
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Hey there,
I checked out your TR Calendar and it looks like you may have made some changes since it seems like there are weekend rides longer than 1 hour on there now. Is that correct?
In any case, Plan Builder will construct a plan for you based on your recent volume and training stress to create a plan that will be sustainable for you over the long term.
If you find that youāre wanting to push your volume up, you can use Workout Alternates to find longer sessions for a given day. You can also check out the following article on adding volume to your TR plan:
And as other athletes mentioned above, you can also edit your custom planās volume, though you may see warnings from Red Light Green Light. We generally recommend following recommendations from RLGL, but ultimately, itās your plan ā if you do choose to go with more volume, make sure to stay in touch with how youāre feeling and donāt be afraid to back things off if you start to feel a bit run down.
Hope that extra info helps you out ā feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions!
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Hi Zackery Weimer,
I had picked Gran Fondo Specialty manually till 03/23 so it comes with longer endurance rides on Sunday by default. I created a custom plan for next race (05/25) specifying it will last something like 4-5h. For that custom plan I saw short endurance rides. I will be following advices on this thread to try increasing volume gradually.
Thanks for your kind help.
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How about just heading out for a long ride and not worrying about the plan. For all you know, you might complete the ride first time and if you donāt, you will know your level and give you something to work on.
I somehow managed to get through the FTP fitness custom plan schedule of 4 hr Sunday by lowering my high intensity Sat workouts to 45min. It seems data driven that it allowed 4 hr rides when I was in good shape. However, that stopped working when I dropped FTP and now it warns me if I go past 2h 30m outdoor ride. So Iām guessing if you want to ride outdoor longer, get fit first or in my case - improving FTP takes priority. Not sure if AI should be correlating longer outdoor endurance rides are absolutely unnecessary factor in fitness goals, but it somewhat makes sense in how it prioritizes.