Well I’m sure I’ll get pummeled (and I’m heading out of town for a Ragnar Ultra Relay today), but as I’ve always been a fan of TR and Nate + Crew I thought I would jump in and try to answer questions. I’m the lead(ish) on the TP Adaptive training effort. I’ll try to go through and respond to people before I head out but first some general stuff.
Me: Ryan Cooper
Roles: Founder Best Bike Split, VP at Training Peaks, Math Nerd
Background: In 2012-2013 my Business partner Rich and I started a company called Optimized Training Labs (OTL) which was a virtual coach / adaptive scheduling concept for triathlon. It had some mild traction but we had some fundamental flaws in the way we wanted to bring it to market. The biggest being that we were trying to be the experts as opposed to working with the experts (Hal Higdon, TrainerRoad (Coach Chad), etc.). By 2013 we had launched BBS in beta, originally as a funnel to drive traffic to our virtual coach. Needless to say BBS took off and after being able to kind of ride the fun of that growth to multiple tour teams, gold medals winners, Ironman Champs, and of course all those looking to make course cut offs and cross the finish line with smiles on their faces, I still had an itch to do build something in an area I really care about and it’s rare to get a second chance to create something.
I’ve always thought that if it was done the right way Adaptive Training (not really full on virtual coaching) could be extremely useful, especially people like me who are busy, have multiple kids and commitments making following a strict schedule difficult. The philosophy I prescribe to is that don’t fix what’s not broken and try to build and enhance upon that foundation with an eye (and tech hooks) into future functionality (be it AI inputs, human in the loop, micro or macro adaptation loops, etc). Ultimately we wanted to build a platform where the partner coach / persona could choose the how and at what level to allow the adaptive nature of the plan. Speaking of busy I’m off to drop the kiddos off at school, but will be back to try to help answer some questions.
As a quick side note I’ve been using the Hal app to train for the last 4 months in beta testing. Was happy to take the Ragnar Relay Black Loop overall with my buddy (31.5 miles of pair trail running split over a couple days) by just over a min. We’ll see if the fitness can carry over to a 4 person 125 mile race tomorrow!