I could live without any data or analysis on the TrainerRoad platform, as long as the workouts sync to my Garmin 935. That’s the minimum for me…
Run:
Initially: Check off calendar workout, time and distance if possible.
Later: send the programmed run workout to my garmin.
I’m less fussed about seeing map etc.
For the swim, if we could have distance instead of/in addition to time that would be awesome. The TR estimate of how long a swim should take is not how long that swim takes for me and I would like to be able to see my weekly yardage.
For me the biggest pain point is having to manually check off runs in the calendar, and complete the actual duration and intensity. Maps, intervals, graphs, I would not mind as I can already see in garmin connect or strava. Its continously keeping the calendar manually synched that’s super annoying.
Appreciate you at least being interested in feedback. I have no problem if other features are more highly prioritised. What I think the consensus here though is that there is an opportunity here that a 20% stop gap solution solves 80% of frustration level.
Obviously would love the Rolls Royce solution down the line.
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That’s a whole other thing to do. I think people are asking for stuff to be shown in TR, not workouts synced to Garmin watches (although I totally want to do this!).
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2nd that - 100% my view too
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How do we measure intensity for a run? I think you might mean min per km/mile, correct?
Something like
Duration: X:XX
Distance: xx km or miles
Pace: X:XX min/km or miles/km
Correct?
To be honest I’d be happy with:
It logging run automactically from strava/garmin with just:
Distance and time
PLUS automatically ticking off planned run in calender as complete (at planned intensity to calculate TSS like currently does, which could manually change if wanted like currently).
This would mean I could go out for a run with my garmin and when I finish know it would be logged as completing my planned run on TR with distance and time.
Therefore don’t need to manually go to calendar and log it as complete and time etc.
Not fussed about anything else, can see that on Strava etc if I want.
By the way @Nate_Pearson - thank you so much for being involved with this discussion! Whether it happens soon or not, your involvement is amazing.
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I know you’ve said that you’ve got much bigger plans for running/swimming, but as a stop gap until that happens if any work get’s done on it.
Minimum
- Swim/Run synced in from where ever, no more having to manually add every activity.
- Duration & Distance in calendar, distance less so, seems the calendar doesn’t focus on distance as much, but if not doing TSS then perhaps have distance. Maybe the larger the screen the more than get’s shown, average pace for run would be nice to have too.
- Week end, have distance. Swimming/Running more distance based than biking.
Nice to have
- Option to have Swim distance in yards/meters different from metric/imperial settings. Some people swim in meters pool, but everything else is in miles/yards/etc.
- Graph overview of Pace/HR/elevation/cadence in actual workout view
- Map showing where you went if outdoors run
- Calories(kJ)/Elevation Gain/Max HR/Average HR
- Laps similar to the biking laps, where it says HR, Pace, Start/End/Duration
- Records similar to bike power, e.g. 400m, 800m, 1k, 5k, 10k, Half, Full
More turning into a wish list, but the biggest complaint is definitely having to add everything manually and swapping back and forwards between different apps to do so.
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Thanks for taking the time to listen here. From my perspective My Run/Swim workouts go into Garmin/Strava - it would be great to have those come across in your existing integrations so they appear in TR. Checking off workouts makes good sense as well.
Even if you called this a Early Access programme and made it very clear it was work in progress it would make sense.
The end game here of course is whatever your plans for Running and Swimming may be in the future; we are all going to want our history in TR for real season comparison etc. Bringing this data in now just seems logical to avoid mass data entry at some point in the future… As a beginner triathlete all the TR graphs and analytics are only part of the story so I need to manually enter the Run/Swim workouts - it would be a huge benefit to just have them flow in to TR to complete the training analytics picture for each athlete.
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Okay, I talked with the team and I’m going to share a roadmap thing with ya’ll. I normally don’t do this because things could change, but you have been waiting long enough.
We think we can do run/swim support after Group Workouts are on our mobile app. Brandon will be the product manager. He’s the guy who did Calendar, outside workouts, Plan Builder and Group Workouts. He’s also an ex-pro triathlete who trained at the Olympic training center so he knows what’s up and you’ll be in good hands.
So you’ll see it go like this: New mobile app release → Group Workouts on mobile → then we’ll start with run/swim support. I don’t have an exact timeline for this though, but we are going as fast as our little fingers can type.
Please keep putting what you’d like in this thread. This will be a good resource for the team to comb through when we start to put details into issues.
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This message just made my day! 
Stay safe!
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Thanks Nate for taking time to share the roadmap with us. Really appreciate it and know its a risk on your side putting your team under pressure.
I think like many of the comments above mentioned if TR could just pull in time, distance, and pace for the run we could go in and manually set the RPE for the activity to generate a TSS value. MVP wouldn’t need to include something like and automatic TSS calc I don’t think.
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Wow, this is big news @Nate_Pearson! I think you are giving a lot of people a lot of hope & excitement with this post. Just so constructive to have you interact here, ask for feedback and communicate with us.
I was first reading the cascade of feedback to your question “What is the minimum amount of running everyone would want to see?”. The common tone of “step 1, automatically tick off the run” looks encouraging to me.
My feedback, in order of prio:
- Auto tick-off a run with planned TSS. Option to change manually. (Auto-tick off swim? I use Polar and the swim doesn’t even make it to strava. But I suppose swimming is something different from running again)
- Total distance and total time as ran, vs requested time. (respects the global metric/imperial setting, allows switching min/km and km/h)
- Average HR and cadence for total run
- Graph of HR, speed, elevation and cadence vs time for total run. Similar to the power/cadence/HR vs time graph we have for cycling. I don’t have it, but power measurements with pods are available for running. Supporting those (if e.g. Strava has the data) makes a lot of sense.
- Career integration: at what pace could we run for which distance? Maybe start at a minimum of 250m, for shorter distances the pace data is generally not accurate enough without a running pod. Would be great to see changes over time on the 2K, 5K, 10K times.
- running TSS, dare I say? I put it at low prio for a reason, long term it is good to have of course. I also recognize that the elevation and pace data relies on GPS and for short burst is quite inaccurate. Then again some estimate of effort is inescapable.
- A map, but it’s really not that relevant to me.
- As noted before in this thread: pushing workout to watches. I’m afraid this will be a mountain of effort, so I really put it last. I would be amazing however. Issue would be all the different watch eco-systems of course. (example: polar with anatomy (Get A Free, Personal Running Plan: Polar Running Program | Polar Blog) .
Just to reiterate: the big big gain is with item 1->4, which is probably/hopefully low-hanging fruit. Very exciting!
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Great news and many thanks for the update. It’s this kind of customer interaction both in the forum and the podcast (and of course beers with Chad!) that has made me so loyal to TR and recommend it so much!
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Awesome, Thanks! I get the priorities; and that does make sense. Knowing where this sits on the horizon is all I needed.
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Awesome news.
To me the MVP would be:
- Marking workouts as complete.
- Calculating and logging rTSS/sTSS.
- Basic data displayed.
Run: AVG Pace, AVG Cadence, distance & elevation.
Swim: Distance, AVG pace & intervals for pool swims. - Ability to add a post workout note.
Although this assumes all the source data is stored backend at launch so new features & metrics would be available with already logged runs/swims.
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Overall I totally agree with you but I think 1, 3 and 4 are the priorities here. rTSS and sTSS are challenging metrics and if you look at some of old TrainingPeaks blogs you get the sense of how cagey they are about it and how it’s not anywhere near as reliable as cycling TSS. In the end I just ended up giving my own sTSS based on the length and intensity as the figure varied so much depending on your session structure.
Also, with running and rTSS I live in a hilly area and do a lot of trail running so sometimes my pace might be 12min/mile for three miles but I could be really grinding on that, then I come back down at 7min/mile and it’s a very smooth cruise. I’ve never been convinced by TP’s ability to calculate this stress well, especially on very steep ground because they calculate it based on a threshold pace. I know Strava mitigates this with gradient adjusted pace but that might be proprietary and I would much rather see the basic features you highlighted in 1, 3 and 4 added soon and let @Nate_Pearson and @Brandon figure out the more complex metrics in their own time rather than hold the whole thing up.
1, 3 and 4 are really basic and I would hope considering some of the other features that are available shouldn’t be too difficult. I ditched TP for TR alone in November 2019 and the lack of swim and run functionality in comparison to the wealth of features for cycling is frustrating. Glad to hear the team are turning their attention to this as I think it could add a lot for triathletes and duathletes.
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I can’t dispute your arguments on the accuracy of rTSS as I simply don’t know enough about how these things are calculated. My justification of calculating rTSS having some value here, under the assumption it would be a somewhat accurate measure of stress, is two fold:
-
As a relative newbie, and being self-coached, I find tracking total TSS quite helpful in terms of getting my head around balancing the three disciplines over the course of weeks/months. Even if it’s not totally accurate, like you I live in a hilly area and hit the trails, it still feels like it adds value. (It’s one of the features that keeps me with TP)
-
Chad’s running workouts that compose part of the triathlon training plans all have an rTSS associated with them. It would seem lacking to launch a new feature like this that didn’t tie into a metric the coach has specified. It would also potentially be a nice stepping stone towards measures of compliance for completed run workouts potentially. rTSS inaccuracy point taken on compliance though.
All that being said I’d still be delighted if this launched with only #1, #3 and #4 from my original list and #2 was added later as part of larger piece around compliance or the general data UI.
I’m really looking forward to see what the TR team do in the long term with some of the data and metrics compared to those within TP. I suspect they could be really insightful.
If you’re UK/EU timezone based maybe you can educate me on rTSS during a TR group ride sometime, I’d be interested to understand it a little more
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Amazing @Nate_Pearson. Like others I personally just want it to flow over and checked as complete from Garmin Connect or Strava so i don’t have to manually put them in there.
I am usually pretty good at doing it but it means I go to free training peaks app and get the hr tss and then put in the data. Still more than likely will have to get the tss there but less to input.
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Awesome @Nate_Pearson, thanks for bringing us into the loop on this one. It is cool to see a little more of the behind the scenes of how you guys function.
For me I think the first step of it being super useful would be to just get the raw data in from my watch.
- Time, Distance (this would give you avg. pace)
- Other standard channels from watch (HR, Power, Cadence) incl. laps as broken up in watch
- Map of run (seems like it could be very similar to what you do for outside rides?)
- Given TR’s connection to training with power, it would be very cool to at least give us the ability to analyze a PR chart (or PDC) similar to what we have for cycling. The difference for running would be that maybe 2 graphs would be more applicable. Power/Time & Pace/Time.
Granted most of this is focused on running, but that’s where my real feedback lies.
Thanks again for all of your efforts guys!
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