What I would love to see is an option where if you stop spinning temporarily during a workout, the workout pauses, but the timer continues as well as the recording of heart rate (and cadence?). There are two primary use-cases I see for this, one of which might open the door to some additional development.
-
If you need to take a non-spinning recovery (e.g. after a hard VO2 interval), this would properly record this instead of cutting this rest out altogether. Similarly, the effects of stopping for food/water/mechanicals would show more correctly into the total workout.
-
This would allow for on/off-bike strength circuits/training. I’ve been enjoying incorporating strength training mini-circuits in my recovery/endurance workouts. This involves hopping off the bike for 4-8 minutes and doing strength work. The current way that pausing works on TrainerRoad these circuits are basically blips on the workout and heart rate and time are omitted.
For both of these, it is important that the prescribed workout itself does NOT continue, so it has to be more nuanced than simply keeping the timer going. I would imagine the easiest way to add this would be to crop the “stopped” times for TrainerRoad’s purposes (essentially reverting back to current functionality), but including these “stopped” times in the output which is passed to other apps/services.
This change could lead to some intentional on/off-bike strength work prescriptions, a potential new area of growth for the TrainerRoad system.