To the thread title, I did Sandy Bay (2h 15m endurance) after 3h 30m MTB ride out at Ford Ord on Saturday. When the TR survey popped up, I rated the endurance as HARD with the factor being Training Fatigue. I can feel the two days worth in my legs, so definitely NOT useless for me. Thankfully today is a rest day.
I always prioritize HR and feel over power on endurance days
I want to feel like I’m working while being able to have a conversation and not have any burn in the legs
I also think about the goal for the week to determine whether I should be in the upper, mid, or lower end of the range
K.I.S.S.
Definitely have been using workout alternates. I was just very surprised that the VO2 workout alternatives ramped up in difficulty VERY quickly, but the endurance ones didn’t do that at all. So, I was trying to keep them within the scope of what it was recommending to me.
I feel like these PLs are very wrong, though. I’m guessing that sticking with AT will make these somewhat more equal? What should this look like, ideally?
Wow. That’s nuts. I’d expect your endurance to be in the high 3’s to low 4’s if you only ride indoors, 5-6 if long outdoor rides. Your v02 is batsh*t crazy off the charts yet your threshold barely registers. I’d expect those two to be closely aligned with a slightly higher threshold PL than Vo2. SS/tempo can have a lot more variation. Unless of course you’re racing next week and training for a 3 min TT. 
Take some control back. Pick z2 rides that have you around the .7 IF and work on your threshold.
Yeah that makes sense. OP on the otherhand has his anaerobic PL almost double his tempo/SS/threshold.
According to the zones in TP ,that are attributed to you that range would appear to be Z3.
This is why it gets so confusing because not only do experts have different ideas, percentages and what to anchor the percentages to, but also there seem to be different ranges from interpretations from even the same source.
i can’t for the life of me understand why TR doesn’t factor this into their model. do endurance riding just at the level where it doesn’t f%^k up your hard days. and do lots of it!
Agreed! But I think suggesting lots of easy endurance riding on the trainer is just simply not lucrative for most riders, as for many it is both excruciatingly boring and hurts their butt 
Most of my riding friends agree that doing more easy endurance would be good, but they just can’t stand the boredom and end up doing zwift racing, threshold or sweetspot etc. on the trainer instead.
2 hours indoors is about my limit for endurance rides, both from a boredom and comfort perspective. I also do weight training 3-4 days a week and soccer 2 days a week, so I just don’t have that much extra time to dedicate to long endurance rides. I would rather add an extra day or two with endurance rides than make the endurance days I have any longer.
Agree. A lot of reasonable stuff has already been said on the thread for the OP to ponder, but taking back some control is what I’d also suggest.
For endurance workouts in particular, I’d forget about outsourcing responsibility to TR or other bunch of software: just ride, whether on trainer or outside, for as long as you have available, at an “endurance” level that you feel will be productive but which won’t fatigue you to a degree that interferes with your subsequent hard workouts.
Forget about PLs for these endurance workouts, and ditch Erg mode for them. Just select any old workout, such as eg. Recess (1hr), to get the workout player running, then extend the time as necessary so that it keeps the player running for as long as you wish your workout to last, and just ride at an intensity “feel” as described above. See 1 million other “Z2” threads for inspiration, if required. 
Maybe TR should create some “Endurance Workout” button/option that makes it simple to do the above, while binning all the PL stuff for these types of workouts. Perhaps some folks need these guardrails for endurance workouts, but for most people I’ve the impression they’re just constraining them and interfering with their attempts to do what feels sensible/appropriate. 
#edited to remove a term that some might find offensive - forgot I was in a civilized part of the internet here! 
As I can see here, these workouts are enough for two people. 
I have to ask, your resting time is enough? Do you have an optimal diet?
-Weight training causes microinjuries in the muscles.
-Soccer equals with sprint trainings depends on your position on the field (ok, it gives you a small endurance because of the 2*45’).
-Your VO2 Max PL is out of ceiling.
According to all of these “hard trainings”, I recommend to extend the endurance time, not the intensity.
As I explained before, when using my training levels to describe workouts (the intended purpose of the system), you have two options: average power as a % of FTP, or the ratio of normalized power to FTP, i.e., IF. They differ in how they deal with the inherent variability of cycling outdoors.
In the case of average power, the levels have been skewed downwards, especially at the lower end, where training is generally less structured. (At higher intensities, training is typically broken into pieces - “repeats”, “intervals” - with less variability within each effort, which is the basis for describing the workout.)
In the case of IF, the normalized power algorithm at least attempts to correct for the variability, such that the reference values themselves do not have to be adjusted downwards.
Since power when training indoors is almost always less variable than when cycling outdoors, the IF standards are a better choice of reference.
Where TR (and many others) have gone wrong has been in 1) treating my training levels as “zones”, i.e., as prescriptive, not descriptive, and then 2) relying on the percentages rather than the IF values.
Excellent advice!
That’s essentially how I titrated the indoor 1 h “moderate intensity filler workouts” that I would do on the ergometer on days in between interval sessions. Because of the limited duration, I ended up smack-dab on the level 2/3 border (based on IF). If the sessions had been longer, though, I would have had to dial it down to where it was squarely in level 2 (again, based on IF).
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here. Are you saying the “Andy Coggan” zones in TP are not the zones you defined? The point @carytb was making was that what you’re calling Z2 above is defined in TP and attributed to you as Z3.
I went and did the same investigation after reading Cogs comment and I saw the same. I thought it was weird, but then I remember that these are endurance rides, so they should be longer in duration to reach that IF. Still, I just can’t bring myself to do more than 90 minutes on the trainer…
If you have the time but not the inclination, then besides the usual comfort things, my main tips for coping with longer endurance are:
(i) plan in a shorter endurance workout that doesn’t daunt you (eg. 1hr 15 mins), then as you get towards the end of it extend it for manageable chunks (eg. 15-30 min), doing this a number of times in conjunction with the next two steps…
(ii) take periodic breaks, a.k.a. cafe stops, where you climb off the bike, take a drink / refill a bottle, maybe eat something (I had those British staples of pork pie & piccallili during a 3hr one one last week 
)
(iii) do similar things on the bike as you’d be doing if lounging around off the bike, eg. read forums or whatever other social media floats your boat, watch interesting/educational youtube vids instead of just races (& maintain a list of stuff for this purpose), watch Netflix or other media, particularly the 2nd/3rd-tier things that you quite fancy but don’t ever seem to have time to watch on your regular TV, listen to podcasts that, again, you’re interested in but don’t seem to find the time for usually. I read a ton of online stuff most days, and I’ve found I can do much of this just as well on the trainer as off it, so combining the two can kill two birds etc., and time flies doing this.
There isn’t necessarily a “right” or “wrong” way your PLs should look. They’ll generally reflect the progress you’ve made most recently, though.
Your VO2 Max level is quite high (in fact, it’s capped out because your PLs can’t go above Level 10), which usually means you should adjust your FTP up so as to find more appropriately challenging workouts. Workouts at Levels 8, 9, or 10+ aren’t impossible, but they should be REALLY hard. If they’re not, that’s likely a sign that your FTP is set a bit too low.
As your current block of training ends, you’ll have the opportunity to use AI FTP Detection or take a Ramp Test to update your FTP. When your FTP increases, your PLs will go down to compensate.
All of your PLs should ideally rise up gradually throughout your training plan, but most athletes are usually better at one or two zones compared to the rest, so it isn’t unusual to have one zone remain higher than the others.
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It’s really quite simple: I have described two, non-interchangeable ways of classifying exercise intensity based on power output: average power as a percentage of FTP, or normalized power divided by FTP.
For the former, the scale is:
below 56% level 1
56-75% level 2
76-90% level 3
91-104% level 4
105-120% level 5
above 120% level 6
way up there level 7
For the latter, the scale is:
below 0.75 level 1
0.75-0.85 level 2
0.85-0.95 level 3
0.95-1.05 level 4
above 1.05 level 5
(the normalized power algorithm doesn’t really apply to short efforts, so the scale stops there.)
The two scales differ because they address the variability of cycling outdoors differently. For steadier efforts, such as typical of indoor training, it is better to go by the second scale, not the first.
I really don’t know how to explain things any more clearly…
Thanks for the response. So, I think what you’re saying is that the average power at the end of a Z2 workout should be 56-75% FTP, but TP (and TR and the others) are prescribing individual INTERVALS at those percentages. (I’m intentionally leaving out the NP part just to get clarity)
Is that correct?