I have low volume plan and want to add some long endurance rides. I just want to ride indoor with 65% of FTP for some time between 1h and 4h ideally without planning the duration earlier, I just stop when I feel like it but it’s not a must-have, I can plan the duration.
For now I added a 9h custom workout and just rode it for 2h and stopped but I think that adaptive training is messed up because of two facts:
Training was planned for 9h which is huge
Training was “cut short” so I didn’t actually completed whole 9h (I never planned to)
When I add this single workout to the plan it also says “not reccomended ±0” in a place where usually there is something like “productive +0.5”
It didn’t increase my endurance level at all but at Workout Levels of this workout I can read “Endurance completed Work” = 10.6 which for sure is calculated based on 9h ride and not on actual 2h
Next day I got a WARNING that my stress is very high and they reccomend rest day. Normally they reccomend “rest day or endurance” but this time it was hard “rest day”. I think it calculated that based on 9h and not actual 2h. Anyway I am less tired after 2h zone 2 than after 1h intervals so it feels wrong.
At the same time my low volume plan adds some useless 45min 50%FTP “endurance” rides that apparently actually boost my endurance…
I would choose some preconfigured workout but max I can see for endurance is 1:45min
Will it help if I add more precise custom workounts. Example:
2h workout if I want to ride ~2h
3h workout if I want to ride ~3h etc?
I do not know.
They have 0% of FTP setup. Assuming that I can change difficulty during the ride to 65% they would be OK training but I would guess that Training Road algorithms would be even more confused about what is actually happening.
I do not know either. I have never used those Free Ride workouts.
In the scenario you describe in the first post, I think the main problem has been caused by TR treating your 2h ride as a total fail (because you planned it as a 9h ride and it wasn’t completed).
I think you are right that finding a workout of the appropriate duration is the way forward.
If you can accept a power range, rather than 65% constant, then you have a few more options in the catalogue.
Or you could create 30 / 60 / 120 custom workouts and stack them back to back based on how you feel on the day to give you the desired overall ride time.
There is slight inconvenience with that: any typical TR workout’s cooldown is at quite low intensity, meaning you need to click a lot to bring it up to your suitable 65%. As a workaround, create custom workout, something like:
- 5m Z1
- 5m 68%
- 10m 65%
Hopefully this gives TR app hint that cooldown happens at 65% intensity i.e. as long as you keep pedalling, it extends workout at it. Plant it in calendar whenever you want.
You will not get lot of PL increase for “meaty” 5m 68% work interval but as a whole workout, it will be considered during TR AI FTP detection.
If you go to workouts and check endurance plus the 2:30 and longer box you will see the long endurance workouts.
If you pick let’s say a 2 hour one, you might be able to ride as long as you want if you choose the option to do it as an outside workout. It works with my Garmin.
This certainly sounds like an edge case we may not have anticipated.
As @TrekCentury said, you can use the Workout Library to filter and search for Endurance workouts longer than 2h30m, which should give you plenty of options to choose from (no need to make custom workouts for those ones since they already exist!).
I think that would likely be your best path forward here – the tough variable to work around is the aspect of stopping when you feel like it. If you stop before the workout is completed, then it will likely be marked as “Did Not Pass” by Adaptive Training, and thus trigger adaptations to your upcoming workouts, as you have already seen.
If you decide how long you want to ride before getting on the trainer and then choose an Endurance workout that corresponds with that duration and complete the workout, you should see more success with using Adaptive Training.
These are not endurance rides, but recovery rides. AT thinks you are fatigued and you should recover before resuming training.
You need to be very careful when doing this, because inconsistency is a recipe to disrupt your training. “Riding as you feel like it” is fundamentally in tension with structured training.
Moreover, with endurance rides, the way to achieve progressive overload is mainly by extending the duration. So if you are not used to doing 4-hour endurance rides and you hit your system with that, your body will need time to recuperate so that you can accept new training stimulus.
I suggest you add more consistency and only ramp up your duration once you are sure that your body has adapted.
