Just giving TR a spin. I currently bike about 8-13h / 5 days a week. Variability usually comes down to how long a long ride I can get in. I also do 3.5-4h of weight training.
My TSS has been in the 300 to 350 ballpark. Can go down a bit or up to 450 depending.
I picked a couple of rides I"m interested in next year. A Gravel Unravel A ride in June and the one day Seattle to Portland ride (206m ride) in July.
The generated plan has me at 90-240 TSS per week. 3 days of Hard Intervals. No more than 1.5h in the saddle. All the way up to race day.
I’m almost certain this’d put me into detraining in my CTL ramp. And I’m not confident I can do a 200m ride at moderate intensity for 12h if I’ve only been in the saddle for 1.5h at most.
Everything I’ve read says to prepare for a ride like that I need to be hitting long rides in the 75% of target range leading into the recovery phase. That’s just shy of 10h in the saddle.
I tried increasing from the Recommended “Balanced” all the way up to “Aggressive”. This increased the TSS closer to the range I’m at now. And increased the days from 3 → 5. . . but still only 5/6h training a week and no more than 1.5h in the saddle.
What am I missing? Is this sufficient for such a long ride? I’d hate to end up being unprepared for the event and bailing 1/2 there.
If you haven’t already you can increase the hours you are available when setting up your plan. You can also select outdoor solo or group rides on the weekends to match you long endurance rides. This should help boost the over-all volume of your plan.
Another thing you may consider is to select the 2 workouts per week option, especially as your focus is endurance. And lastly you can slide over the training to be more aggressive. This, along with one the extra endurance day (in place of intensity) may be a better set-up for your goal events.
Plan builder looks at what you’ve actually done in the past and how your performance improved, then suggests an optimal workload.
This i think is a more realistic way to look at training load than assuming you will comply and benefit from a preconceived training load.
I assume it’s imperfect, so the first month this year I did purely as recommended, then I added another day in February. I’ll recreate the plan in March too after reviewing Feb.
Interestingly, after poking around with settings and filling out some of the prompted profile stuff…then rerunning the plan generator it up’d me from 3 to 4 days. Still 5-6h. But…if I stretch the long endurance ride from 2 to 5 hours it gets pretty close to what I was doing until the last couple of months or so.
I may give it a month, see how things go. Maybe leave it at 2h on the long ride, but do my own ramp up by 10% or so each week. That rate would put me in the ballpark of the 10h pre event target.
Have you uploaded your ride history to TR? IDK how this might affect the plan generation. There’s a that goes on in TR that I find inadequately explained.
I think one thing that was surprising is there wasn’t any volume increase in the plan over a 6mth period. So no ramp up or anything.
Do the plans dynamically change after generation in response to training results? Seemed odd that such a long structured plan remained relatively static in volume leading up to an event.
Incrementally increased some rides time (like bumped the 30m to 1h, long ride from 1.5 to 2.5, etc)
I increased the ride times till it flagged it as potential over training, then backed off one notch.
This actually puts me right about where I am right now in weekly TSS and a bit less in actual time. So more intensity, less hours. But real close. . . . which makes sense as I’ve been mostly doing low intensity, longer rides over winter and just started shifting that to higher intensity rides as we roll into spring.
So…a high level translation might be: Trainer Road’s balanced plan is more conservative than what I’ve been doing. My current CTL is closer to the top end of demanding, bordering on aggressive.
I also clicked the “Masters” option as, well, I am a masters rider. . . and 3 hard rides a week seems a bit much. At least till I get a few weeks of adapting to the 2 hard rides a week.
I start today. So the real test on how easy everything integrates begins! I have a somewhat heterogenous routine with a Peloton, outdoor road, gravel, and mtb. Some with power. Some without. . . . and weights. Just hopped from TP to Intervals icu.
I’m interested to see how easy it is to push the ride plans to garmin connect and if they’re “seen” as satisfying the workout in the TR calendar.
Looking at your most recent post in this thread, it sounds like you’re on the right track.
I also wanted to mention that Workout Alternates might be a good tool to use for days when you’d like longer/shorter workouts while sticking with the prescribed zone. That can be a good way to get a little extra volume in from time to time.
Just keep an eye on Red Light Green Light, especially if you start to feel any fatigue that you can’t quite shed off. Don’t be afraid to take some extra recovery if needed to keep your plan on track.
Good luck and happy training – feel free to let us know if you have any additional questions as you get after it!
Immediately after my first ride the adaptive training proposed modifications. Including over an hour more on my long ride and 15-30m more on my endurance and hard rides.
I other words, it looks like it almost immediately started to converge on my previous CTL/Fitness levels.
Maybe I’ll loop back here and update 1 week / 1 month in.
