Here’s an update on structured outside TR workouts.
Garmin - They work but they can count some as struggle/fail even though you passed them.
Wahoo - We don’t analyze them today.
Wahoo isn’t supported at the moment because we don’t get the associated WorkoutId (what TR workout it was) passed through the Strava API to us. We do get this through the Garmin API so we’re able to intelligently identify the workout.
But, because of the nature of outside workouts and the variability, our ML isn’t as good as we’d like it to be at classifying those outside workouts (although it’s being improved).
What are we doing to improve/address this?
We’re trying to hit three improvements at once:
- Accurately classify Garmin/Wahoo structured workouts
- Give credit for partially completed workouts or workouts that are turned up
- Give multi-level credit for unstructured and structured workouts
With the approach that we’re doing, we should get all three at once and everyone should be happy. The coolest thing is that we should be able to give you endurance and threshold points for a say a 40 min threshold climb and then 4 hours of endurance whether it be indoor or outdoor.
We had some fancy ideas on how to get the workout Id to the Wahoo rides but because the ML isn’t as good as indoor on these rides we thought this new approach would be even better.
What are we going to do near term?
An engineer is going to make it so that all structured Garmin/Wahoo rides are automatically a “pass” when you do them, then you’ll have a survey to make it so you can say you didn’t pass the workout.
The failure rate for workouts is like 6%, so this gets us to make the majority of outside workouts a pass and then users can still change the classification manually.
The engineer that’s going to do this has a different priority that is in testing but will hopefully be able to move to this in the next few days.
Of course, this is just a bandaid and not our long-term solution.
The long-term solution is the one that I listed above. That is pretty far along and is in what I would call “alpha testing”; the engineer has it working and is validating it against our current approach but it hasn’t been tested by outside people.
Outside rides are not a requirement for full AT launch. We made this decision based on TR data/usage over the last 10 years. A lot of athletes can get a huge improvement in their training with what we have for AT today.
But, scoring outside rides is also a big priority for us. I feel it really unlocks a lot more value (maybe 2-5x?) if we can get a complete picture of your riding. It’s just not going to hold up other value that we can release.