Maybe it’s a pedantic thing of mine, but the after ride RPE request seems a bit… clunky.
If I tell it I had a hard ride, it wants to restructure the next few rides to accommodate.
But what if the ride was supposed to be hard?
It seems like a comparative survey would be more appropriate.
This will be hyper-simplistic, but maybe something like this:
”This was a threshold workout, it should have felt overall like a 7-8 out of 10 effort.
Was your relative effort to that benchmark:
1-Much Easier
2-Slightly Easier
3-On Par
4-Somewhat Harder
5-Much more difficult
6-Not able to complete today due to difficulty”
Maybe it’s just me, but the gut instinct is to not say how hard things were because it’s going to completely redo my schedule for the next few days. Which at face value is great, it’s adapting. I’m just wondering if it’s adapting to the right thing.
I also struggle what to put as effort. Sometimes the intervals are “hard” but the ride not.. so what is TR supposing as effort to calculate for the AI model.
Some rides are indeed supposed to be hard and if you rate them as such it does not make your future rides easier.
I’m on a low volume plan so all my rides are hard! I rate pretty much all my rides hard or very hard and they just keep getting harder… in a controlled way of course.
Rate the workout as a whole honestly and it will adapt accordingly if necessary.
I personally like that it’s a nice simple survey at the end that I don’t need to think about too hard so wouldn’t like them to overcomplicate it.
As you said, you’re only on a 3day per week plan. So it’s likely you don’t notice the changes I’m referring to as there’s a lot of rest baked into your schedule.
After my ride on Tuesday, I marked it as ‘hard.’ Adaptation recommendations made.
Went back and changed it to ‘moderate.’ No adaptations recommended.
I’m ok with this being an artifact of my own training history and current plan, that’s fine.
But I still think the after effort survey is too simplistic.
We always recommend that you simply rate the workout on how it felt. Don’t overthink it.
We have estimations of how each workout will feel for you, and your response helps us determine how to adjust your training moving forward. It’s not always linear and can be complex, but it does work, and your responses are important. Do your best to be honest and accurate with them.
@GBrown0311, don’t worry about trying to figure out how you think we’re expecting each workout to feel. Just rate it how it felt. There isn’t an automatic penalty for telling us the workout was hard. As you said, some are supposed to be really hard!
Here are our official RPE guidelines:
How to Rate Your Effort
Easy
This ride felt easy and non-taxing, requiring little effort or focus. You could repeat the ride and pass it without issue.
Moderate
This ride was somewhat comfortable but required some focus to complete. You felt a little challenged but had confidence that you could finish. If the ride had an additional set of intervals, you could complete it.
Hard
This ride required effort and focus and was challenging to complete. This will feel tough, and you’ll look forward to this ride ending. If there were an additional interval, you could have done it with some focus.
Very Hard
This ride was very difficult to complete. This ride tested you. If there had been one more interval, you wouldn’t have been able to do it.
All Out
This ride was extremely difficult. It pushed me well beyond my abilities and took a massive amount of energy and focus to complete. You’ll feel like you barely made it to the end of this ride, and that you had to pull out every mental trick in the book to finish.
Thanks. It sprouted from early confusion of the surveys and is a mix of info from TR (mainly via Ivy) and my own paraphrasing. Not perfect, but it helps me and some others here like it too.
This should have its own link on the support page .
There has been a many of workout where I’ve looked back on this.
I have it saved on my phone.
The amount of time I’ve been stuck between Very Hard and Hard and it came down to “Did I have one more Interval in me”
I got one for you.
Did an Anaerobic workout. Sucker was hard, I hate those, the workout was Kettle.
I was able to complete the workout, I think I had another set of intervals in the legs but can’t say for sure, had there been another I would have given it a go.
Now I’m don’t want to rate it Hard because I don’t want the Ai to give me something even harder next week .
What do you do then?
I’m almost at the end of the CX season and even though I’m completing the workouts, these Anaerobic and Vo2 efforts are getting to me.
Very Hard it is. Legs are even feel a little sore this morning, so I feels like that’s the right call.
Even got a Yellow day today.
I do feel like maybe with another workout at that level it will give time to adapt to that effort better.
Yes, I’ve done this without knowing.
Put in a challenging effort but I’m singing when I get off the bike, Hard
F-Bombs followed by “Damn Ai is trying to kill me”, Very Hard
I like your rating system a lot. I too struggle with rpe responses. I mean a anaerobic workout should be all out, shouldn’t it? But I’m not gonna mark it that. Because then it changed my plan, like you said.
I rate pretty much all my rides hard or very hard and they just keep getting harder… in a controlled way of course.
