I was wondering if anybody had and tips for when life gets in the way of your training.
I seem to be in a constant loop of getting through base, or close to the end and then having a holiday/injury/issue and missing a week or two.
This time I’ve had two weeks off after testing positive for Covid. Luckily my symptoms weren’t severe and I’m feeling ok, if a little tired.
What I’ve tended to do in the past is just reset plan builder and go through base again, but I have really had enough of this as i never seem to move on.
My A race isn’t until the beginning of Sept, so I do have plenty of time.
What I’d like to do is a mini block of base (maybe 3 weeks or so) to get me back to where I was and then move on to build and carrying on with plan builder.
I’ve tried playing around with the start date in plan builder, but can’t get this to work and just wondered what other people do when they hit a snag.
This does feel like an area where TR’s Plan Builder seems to come a bit unstuck. I doubt many of us manage to get through a whole plan without some issues/needing to take some time off, but I can’t see how to easily adjust plan builder to take these events into account.
I’m sure there must be a better way to do this than what i’m doing, so any tips much appreciated.
You can “push” weeks in the Calendar - all subsequent weeks will also get pushed. Use the “…” menu at the right of the week (next to the week number) and select “Push week”. Do that however many times to take account of the weeks off. Then do it one more time. Now copy your last week of workouts before your break (again use the same menu), or one that you think will be useful to get you back up and running, and paste into the last of the empty weeks.
If it’s just a week off, then you might get away with just pushing for one week only. Depends where you are. In Build I’d push two weeks then repeat the last week of workouts before the break.
Honestly I usually just jump back in where I left off. Longer periods of inactivity, I will manually adjust my FTP down an appropriate amount. Maybe 10 watts for one week and gradually increase it over the next week or so.
I follow a low volume plan and will stack the workout hard for the holidays. All three hard workouts for the week in a row if needed. You have to be smart about it though. Usually do the VO2, then threshold, then sweet spot. Basically use the intensity factor to determine workout order. If I can do that, everything else is bonus. I’ll try and get a 30-45 workout in on a couple days later in the week, but the key workouts are done.
By the time I start again on Monday it will have been three weeks off.
Pushing three weeks now is fine, but at some point something has to be removed from the plan so that you hit your A race at the end of a taper, rather than having your A race now sitting in one of the toughest training weeks.
I like that plan builder works all this out for me, which is why I normally just reset it and go through base again.
I can’t help thinking there needs to be some way to choose at which point in your current plan you would like to start from again and for plan builder to adjust to take this into account. I’d hoped that adjusting the start date to nine weeks in the past would put me towards the end of base and I could carry on from there, but it doesn’t appear to be that simple.
What I want to do is a three week base to put me back where I was, before stepping up to build and carrying on with plan builder.
What plan builder has me doing is another 12 weeks of base.
Yes your taper will now be X weeks after your event
This is one of those situations where Plan Builder isn’t quite there yet. At the moment if you push a week you’ll get a notification that doing so will mean you can’t do further modifications to the plan. There is the assumption that you’ll be able to follow the plan so “Life adjustments” fall outside that assumption.
Maybe try doing your plan again (PB won’t let you configure overlapping plans so I set “test” plans for the next year and then play around), shorten your overall plan by three weeks or whatever by bringing your A event forward and then see how it compares to your current plan.
All a bit seat of pants/second guessing what PB would give you I know.
My training partner just had COVID. He took two weeks off completely. Luckily his first week lined up with my recovery week. So, he dropped his FTP from 325 to 290, a solid week of endurance, bumped the FTP to 300 for the first hard workout back, up to 307 today. It was a hard VO2 max workout today. So he missed a little, but is obviously back on track pretty quickly.
I’ve already deleted the plan I had and redone it 5 times trying to get what I want, I wish I’d though of doing it as a test in next year, that’s a great tip
