🎉🎉🎉 Introducing Plan Builder! 🎉🎉🎉

Announcements
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You now have the ability to build a custom plan leading up to your goal event with Plan Builder. This has been added to Early Access and is ready for beta testing!

Why Plan Builder?

Cyclists rarely have a single event they are working towards, and the amount of time to their goal event varies widely from person to person. Training plans exist for just about every cycling discipline, but only account for the ideal scenario in which a single goal event is targeted in the future. Until now, plans had to be pieced together for each event.

Plan Builder allows you to build out a custom plan leading up to your goal event(s). It takes into consideration the unique demands of your goal event, how much training stress you can tolerate, and what your schedule is like when building your plan. The resulting plan will automatically be applied to your calendar so you can start training! Note: Plan Builder is currently only available on the website, but is being added to our desktop apps now.

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Enabling Plan Builder

This feature is now live for all users! Simply go to Log In to TrainerRoad

How it Works

Launching Plan Builder will walk you through a series of questions needed to build your plan. These questions include how much time you’ve been training recently, what volume plan you’d like, and your experience level.

You’ll then enter any goal events for the year, pick your training days, and check out your plan. Your custom plan is designed to make you as fit as possible for your goal event(s), and is easily added to your calendar so you can start training!

Feedback

We are looking for overall feedback on the experience of the flow, anything that may be confusing or not make sense, and any bugs you encounter during the full process of building and applying a Custom Plan. I will also note that it is possible to easily delete a Custom Plan, so it won’t mess up any current training plan you are following.

Feel free to drop all feedback either in this thread or through the Early Access feedback option. We’d like to keep our support team free of additional requests as things are starting to really ramp up for them.

FAQs

What if I don’t have goal events?
No events, no problem! Plan Builder allows you to build out a plan to just make you as fit as possible leading up to the date of your choice. If you don’t pick a date we’ll build you a year long plan.

What if I already have events on my calendar?
We don’t want to spoil things too much, but Plan Builder will take into account events already added to your calendar if you’d like, or you can start fresh.

What if I need to add events later?
No problem! When new events are added after a custom plan has been applied, we’ll ask you if you would like those events to be accounted for in your plan.

What if I need to take time off?
We’re currently working on the ability to add in planned vacation or other time off. We don’t have an ETA for when this will be done yet.

What if I’ve already started training?
Go ahead and choose a start date when you actually started training. This will make it so you will get on track with where you currently are in your training!

Known Issues/Bugs

  • Plan Builder is currently only available on the website
  • You currently can only launch Plan Builder from the Training Plans section of the web. We are adding the ability to access it from the calendar.
  • Some weekly tips reference the week of their parent plans. We are working on updating these.
  • There are a handful of mobile specific formatting bugs being looked at.
  • Moving around workout days will cause your Ramp Test to appear in the wrong spot in some blocks.
  • You currently can only end on an A event. We have a change being tested now to allow you to end on B/C priority events.
  • Climbing Road Race doesn’t always update when being added as a discipline.
  • Overview page just reloads when you attempt to add a mid or high volume Half Distance Tri plan.
  • Timezone bug that impacts users in a GMT +1 day timezone when they attempt to edit individual blocks.
  • Stage Races and Triathlon events added to the calendar aren’t imported when you run through Plan Builder.
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107 Likes
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Oh my gosh this is amazing!

Edit: Now I have to decide on a A event :stuck_out_tongue:

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Someone’s been busy!

Not sure I’m advanced enough yet to make use of this feature but I think a lot of guys will thank you for this functionality.

Nice work!

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Yes… Yes…

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Enabled - this could be great!

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This is wild… my goals have changed just recently and the idea of a no-goal year for cycling but other goals would be interesting to see.

It’s no wonder I’ve been such a long subscriber

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Awesome idea!

One issue I just encountered while testing it is that I had set a 3 day stage race at the end of my cycle. All 3 stages set as A races, but the buillder does not allow to have multiple A races together. Also, I sawy that the stage race classification was not available.

Thanks a lot for the continuous improvement!

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Looks awesome, kudos TR team!

Just tried adding a plan and have an enhancement request - I’d like to add weekly Wed night worlds as a recurring C event. Currently I have to add each week, one by one.

If I add a repeating Other Activity for Wed night worlds:

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(minor nit: two date formats are used 2020-03-04 and 10/28/2020)

Then I get double workouts in the output of Plan Builder:

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Would really help if C events had a repeating option, like the Other Activity option.

Edit: easy workaround - add first C event, and then use calendar copy feature to put weekly worlds on the calendar. That was easy!

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@swin2000 If you build a stage race as an individual event you won’t run into this problem. We added the event type “stage race” to get around that. You’ll be able to add as many races as you’d like within the stage race umbrella.

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Just had a wee play with my upcoming A event in June - 3 weeks climbing cycling in the French Alps with 100+kms and 2000-3000m climbing per day. Not a race, but definitely an A event

None of the options intuitively had a good fit, but i went with Gran Fondo and it came back with SSB1&2, SPB, & Century which is the common solution recommended on the forum for these kind of adventures - a great start! The process of working through to a plan was a breeze and very TrainerRoad.

It might not be a priority today, but it would be great to have some non race “A” events available to select like “Multi Day Mountainous Metric Century” incorporated into the options available.

Given the target event, would Gran Fondo be the logical selection from your point of view @bnied , or would there be a better option?

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Does it still assign you workouts or do you have to pick your own workouts?

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Super excited to try this out!

Going through the initial process now. I wasn’t able to move past the Event portion of the process if I imported existing events (even if I fixed all of the errors like selecting race type or plan start proximity to event). I had to skip importing existing events and add new ones in order to move past it or else the “Next” button just stayed grayed out.

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It does a full plan and all workouts, based on your events (and the settings you assign for each event). It adjusts plan length and workouts preceding events depending on A or B, or B with opener settings.

Try it out, add some target events (or a full season) and start through the Builder. It walks you through, gives a preview, and when you like it, drops all the workouts on the calendar.

You can even open phases on the calendar and make adjustments after the fact.

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Make sure your last event is an A event, or it will stay stuck like that.

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I suppose if I read the full list of bugs all the way to the end I could have figured out my own question. Ha Thanks

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Awesome! will try this. I didn’t see it as I had previously added the events in the calendar.

Cheers!

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Do you think it would be wise to add all of my races to it? Or just my target ones. Like for instance i plan on doing the 10 series xc races throughout summer, plus most of the weekly Thursday night “fun” races. Should I add all of these, or just the target ones?

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Would be cool to be able to add multiple “A” races and then have it automatically fill in the plans in between them to either maintain fitness (if less than say 6 weeks apart) or to re-build and re-specialized…this way you don’t have to make multiple plans.

Currently won’t let me start a plan anytime in 2020.

Would also be awesome if, when building a plan and choosing which dates workouts occur on (i.e. long runs on Sundays, bricks on Thursdays, etc.) you could delete certain workouts so they don’t show up in the plan or add your own workouts that show up weekly throughout that phase. This would be useful for if you’re following your own swim or run plan over TR’s and want to have it automatically fill in your swim plan, or if you do a masters swim class or something.

Looks like an awesome idea and implementation so far!

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I have like 20 races in mine across A, B and C priorities and it’s awesome! Plan Builder can add in openers for B races and plan around those appropriately. Give it a shot!

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