Just wanted to post a quick update since I posed the original question. I have had a brutally busy year. I was raising capital for my company and signed up for a July Half Ironman thinking “Oh, I’ll definitely be done with my raise by then.” As it turned out, I closed on a total recap of my company on July 1st, and my race was on July 13th. To top it off, my wife added a drive to Baltimore (from Nashville, with our 4 kids) the week of July 1st. Regardless of quality, I needed the Trainer Road plan because I did NOT need to do any additional thinking.
In spite of all this life stress, I ended up 3rd in my age group at Ironman Muncie 70.3. It was definitely not the performance I thought I was capable of, but, given the stress, I was pleased with the result (I was more angry at life for holding me back). To emphasize how much stress I was under, two weeks after the race I got shingles for the first time - brutal and painful. But the point is, I followed the TR mid-volume HIM plan to a T (except swim, which I just did with my masters group), and got that result in spite of life generally sucking all that time. Had I tried to do my own plan, or even just my own run plan, I think it would have added many minutes to my time. Kudos to the TR team!