Hey all, new guy on the block here (over from Sufferfest). I just used the plan builder to get me ready for a 100 mile gravel race. I put in high volume and described my A event as 8 hours at race pace. What I don’t understand is that the longest rides are 2.5 hours. Did i miss something or is that the way it is and i should just trust the plan?
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They treat high volume plans differently, Trainerroad spreads the volume through the week more evenly, whereas Sufferfest keeps the workouts mostly under 60 minutes during the week and adds much longer endurance rides at the weekend. If that’s what you want, select a lower volume trainerroad plan and just do longer weekend rides.
TR is very focused on the the time crunched athlete, so there is a heavy bias toward shorter stuff. And you can certainly build a lot of fitness and be well prepared for an 8+ hour event on short rides/workouts. You can trust that the plan will help prepare you for the event.
Is it the path to be best prepared for your event assuming you had the time/desire to train more hours? No (in my opinion), but a large percentage of athletes just don’t have the time. If you do have the time to train more and do longer rides, TR is still an excellent training platform and it’s very easy to add longer rides to your plan manually. I enjoy high volume training and have seen good results, but I continue to use TR to frame and manage my training plan. TR will give me my 2 short interval sessions for the week, and I’ll just add Z2 work to bring the volume up (including my long rides).
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Hey @Xray_ed,
Welcome to the forum! 
You can change the max duration cap for each day of the week if you’d like. This can be done in Plan Builder (see below)…
…or through your calendar if you already have a plan in place. Just select the phase that you’d like to edit (you currently have to edit them all separately) as shown below.
Just know that Adaptive Training might suggest that you work your way up to those longer workouts in which case it won’t schedule workouts at that max duration right away. We recommend allowing AT to ramp you up to that level, but if you’re already really comfortable and confident with those longer rides, feel free to use Workout Alternates or hand-pick a long Endurance ride from our workout library to replace the scheduled workout. AT will start to see that those longer workouts aren’t an issue for you and you’ll get workouts that meet your custom duration scheduled down the road.
For more info check out the support article about this that I’ve linked below or feel free to reach out with other questions! 
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