🎉 🎉 New Feature: Group and Solo Rides in Plan Builder! 🎉 🎉

[ming]

Hey everyone,

We just launched a new feature for anyone who has ever wondered how to incorporate unstructured riding into their training plan! ()

Group and Solo Rides are now available to all athletes! Plan Builder has been updated with a brand new look for the Schedule step. Now, you can add Solo and Group Rides right into your training plan.

How do I schedule Group/Solo Rides?

Schedule a new plan with the updated Plan Builder flow, or update your existing plan by clicking the plan phase annotation.

There’s a new dropdown that lets you choose exactly how you want to ride on any given day:

Got a weekly group ride? Or a weekend solo ride that’s just for the vibes? Set those days to Group Ride or Solo Ride, and schedule your plan.

Once added to your Calendar, you’ll see Group Rides and Solo Rides built right into your training plan! In place of Progression Levels, you’ll see the difficulty of the day on each workout.

What else should I know about Group and Solo Rides?

Each training day of the week has a difficulty associated with it: either Hard Intervals, Endurance, or Easy Ride.

If you swap a Hard Intervals day to be a Group/Solo Ride, it will change to a Hard Ride. Don’t worry about doing structured intervals that day, but try to go hard whether you’re riding in a group or on your own.

For days that call for Endurance or Easy Ride, try your best to do what your training plan would have prescribed. If you know your ride is going to be hard, we recommend scheduling it on a day that would have been Hard Intervals.

You can also set the duration of Group Rides and Solo Rides in Plan Builder. From a short 30-minute ride, up to 5 hours long.

And when you open those rides, you’ll have training guidance on how to approach that ride based on the difficulty that the plan calls for.

Also, Group and Solo Rides work with Red Light Green Light!

If a Group or Solo Ride happens to fall on a Red or Yellow Day, they’ll adapt accordingly. Hard Rides will adapt to be Easy Rides, and any ride will adapt to a Rest Day.

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You don’t need to do anything to have access to this new feature. It’s available to everyone starting today.

I want to give a big shout out to the TR team that worked on this feature! And to all of you who are going to use it, we hope you love it and can’t wait to hear your feedback.

If you’ve got questions or notice any bugs, post about it here or send me a message. You can also email support@trainerroad.com and check out the Help Center article for Group/Solo rides here: Help Center link

Thanks and happy riding!!

[gesteves]

I like this. I think it’d be cool to treat solo/group rides as an alternate outside of plan builder as well, so that if I have a workout scheduled I could easily swap it for a solo or group ride and have it automatically set to easy or hard ride depending on the workout that’s being replaced.

[JaeTee]

Awesome, looks great. Seems like a nice step in the direction of progression levels for unstructured outside rides.

Will there be a way to use this feature to swap a scheduled structured workout to an unstructured solo/group ride as a one time occurrence in an unplanned manner? Say the day of a scheduled endurance workout, I opt to join an unstructured group ride.

[ming]

I certainly agree that swapping a TR workout to a Group/Solo Ride, and vice-versa, would be a very cool feature.

[Dhaulagiri]

Is it just me or did this change remove the ability to customize training days per block of a plan? This morning I could and now I can’t seem to.

[JaeTee]

I see what you did there

[ming]

Customizing training days per block was removed from the Plan Builder schedule step. You can still edit each training phase (phase type, volume, days of week, duration, inside/outside/Group/Solo) from the Calendar.

Clicking on the plan phase annotation will bring up the editable plan details.

[StrayPointer]

Very cool, but I wonder if “Group Ride” should be named something else, as it sounds very road focused? A MTB group ride (or solo ride for that matter) can be a very different animal …

[berto2cj]

I’m confused

My situation. I have a Thursday group ride. I don’t always make it. But it would be sweet to add that when I know I’ll do it (Wednesday I know for sure if I can make it work or not). How can I do that?

Seems I have to edit each phase, assume I’ll do it…and delete it when I don’t make it.

For solo rides I have to pre-plan them for a whole phase? For me I get a surprise extra hour and just go roll. Do I have to go edit the phase each time I want to just hit it for an hour? (Currently I don’t pre plan or do anything with these workouts. At best I might go to trainnow and throw whatever endurance is recommended)

[tim_nh]

So wait, I can’t shuffle training days around anymore? The default easy-hard days and cadence often don’t work for me. Am I now stuck with whatever the robot says is “best?”

-Tim

[AlphaDogCycling]

I played around with Plan Builder, and from this appears that you can still move the days around. I got all the way through Plan Builder, I just didn’t add the test plan I created to my calendar

[DukeHdB]

I think you can just go to the calendar, and for the specific day add an activity, select Bike, then choose the ride details (Group/Solo Ride, intensity, etc) and add?

[cyclhist]

Very cool. Now the only feature that keeps me from coming back permanently is to have plan builder plan out strength training. I need a bit more instruction than the blog posts for that, and everything else is basically how I’d want things now.

[Caro.Gomez-Villafane]

It sounds like the feature that @ming mentioned ( “swapping a TR workout to a Group/Solo Ride, and vice-versa, would be a very cool feature”) is what would resolve your situation.

As of right now, swapping TR Workouts to a Group/Solo Ride, and vice-versa can only be done through the phase annotation, which changes the entire phase.

If you know you will consistently make it to the group ride every Wednesday I would set that day as Group Ride, and then if you happen to be training inside instead that day you could:

1. Use the phase annotation and change that day to be a TR Indoor Workout. After which you would have to set the phase back to Group Rides on Wednesdays.

2. Pick a workout from TrainNow

The same thing would apply to Solo Rides

[Caro.Gomez-Villafane]

@tim_nh, what do you mean exactly by shuffling things around?

You can still edit each phase by phase type, volume, days of the week, duration, inside/outside/Group/Solo from the phase annotation in the Calendar, as well as drag and drop days around on the Calendar itself.

What @ming was mentioning about “training days per block was removed from the Plan Builder schedule step” is that you used to be able to customize each training phase in the Plan Builder Schedule part of the flow. That has now been removed, however, you can still edit each phase through the phase annotations on your Calendar once the plan has been applied.

See images as examples.

You can still shuffle and customize your training days in the Schedule part of Plan Builder, but it is for the entire plan:

Can customize each individual training phase through the Calendar:

[Caro.Gomez-Villafane]

I’ll pass on the feedback

[berto2cj]

EDIT - figured it out

[berto2cj]

Ahh - yeah that does work for my needs - thanks

[rratcliff]

This is fantastic and something I’ve been really wanting to see, thanks! Now a little nitpick. It seems that on the calendar export, the calendar entry it creates is a name of a specific workout and not just ‘Solo Ride’, so in my case it’s showing “Griffen” for a “Solo Ride” and other “Solo Rides” are other names, as if it has a planned workout and solo ride is just overwriting it in the app but not on the calendar export. And just to be clear, this isn’t in app, but using the export calendar link to add events to my main calendar.

But as I also said, just a little nitpick, this is a fantastic addition,