I’m new to the forum and have been a trainer road user for a little over a year now. I have been riding progressively more consistently for the last decade and would randomly drop into a race here and there but have always wanted to do more racing. I’m finally at a point in my life where I have the space to do some more racing and have been slowly building out a calendar. I primarily was focused on longer XC mtb races like endurance category and marathon races but recently added my first gravel race (which I’ve always wanted to try) to my calendar with BWR Bozeman. I might be biting off a bit much on the gravel race but am excited about the prospect of training for it and competing in my age group.
Prior to adding the BWR I had 3 long XC races in March, April and May built out in my training plan. My “balanced” training plan is giving me 4 workouts per week. An hour of VO2 on Monday, an hour of Sweet Spot on Wednesday, a 45 minute Threshold ride on Friday and ~2 hours of endurance on Saturday.
Overall I’m feeling really good in the plan but I can’t help but feel as though that 2 hour endurance ride is too short. I have been going into the workout alternatives tab and progressively bumping my Saturday rides up but then throughout the week I keep getting prompts to adapt it back down to a shorter ride. I guess trainer road is essentially trying to tell me I’m not ready to ride long?
Once the weather on the east coast finally makes a turn I would like to get out for some longer rides on the weekends and my old training logic tells me that I need some really long days in the saddle to prepare for my upcoming events. Am I wrong? I’ve been thinking that instead of going into the longer alternatives I might instead ride whatever feels good for a half hour to an hour to get to a stretch of road/trail where I can actually perform the workout without intersections and minimal interruptions, then perform the 2 hour workout before riding home in some sort of comfortable zone again thereby extending out my ride to 3-4 hours and progressively increasing this way through the weeks.
Have you adjusted your Training Approach in your account settings? You can set the slider more aggressive if you think you can handle it. It will be slower to trigger yellow/red days and won’t be so eager to shorten or make future rides easier.
Account>Settings>Adaptive Training
No, I haven’t tried that. Honestly I didn’t realize it was that easy to adjust mid plan. I will play around with it and see how it tweaks my workouts. My hardest efforts are my threshold days, and I just got an FTP increase, so last week’s threshold workout put me on the limit. I assume adjusting that will increase both intensity and volume?
I don’t know that it will increase both. Or really either. But if you take your 2 hour endurance ride and make it a 4 hour it will certainly be less likely to trigger you a red or yellow day. And less likely to adjust your next couple of days down like you had been seeing.
Also, a bit of an aside. I’m currently doing all of my weekday rides on the trainer at 5am fasted. I have a coffee as I’m getting ready and drink carbs (50 grams) on the bike, but I haven’t had any carbs before getting on. Is this skewing my FTP downwards? I assume it isn’t THAT important as long as the workouts are the correct amount of difficulty and duration but just curious.
I’m planning on trying to get in some carbs as soon as I wake up this Friday to help get through my threshold workout but it’s already an early morning and I don’t want to wake up earlier just to eat.
This will become less of an issue once the east coast weather improves in a month or so and I start doing my weekday workouts later in the day and outside more frequently.
I have done two winters on TR before this year and wanted to try more volume this winter. Because of that, and because the plans even on the aggressive setting top out pretty low, I’ve basically been self coaching using TR as my template. I still have three tougher rides per week on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. The other four days per week are endurance. I just use the workout library to choose workouts of the right type, progression level, and TSS to make a 3 week block that gets progressively tougher followed by a rest week. Once you understand the way TR works, you can design it yourself if you’re willing to put in the time versus having a plan made for you. I would do that if I could get it to spit out a 14 hour/week plan with enough TSS. If you do add volume, just listen to your body and watch red light/green light to make sure you’re not getting a bunch of yellow or red days.
Based on what I have learned over the past few years, if you’re riding basically as soon as you get up I think that not eating beforehand, but then starting to eat (or at least consume calories, as liquid calories are likely to get into your system more quickly) soon after the start of your ride is the way to go. If you eat beforehand (especially if you like to eat a medium to large breakfast), it’s going to signal your body to release insulin into your bloodstream, which is going to begin the ‘calorie storage’ process. And you really don’t want to be trying to store calories while trying to do your workouts. However, once you start exercising, and your muscles start contracting, your body won’t release insulin (or at least not as much) when calories are introduced, because the same mechanism triggered by the insulin will already have been triggered by the muscle contractions.
