Also not bothered that I’m not in yet. Hopefully by November, when most or all of my rides will be inside, I’ll either be in the beta or in a full release version. Until then, train now is perfect for when the weather is bad and I’m riding inside
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If you are mostly riding outside without pushing scheduled workout into outside mode, then using TrainNow is a great way to go. If you are pushing TR workouts to outside mode, then being in AT would be better.
Anyways, there are a few advantages to them releasing the beta during the summer when their subscriptions drop some. That has been noted in other threads.
You make reasonable points in your post.
Regarding the quote above, if your accomplishments / fitness improvements made during your outdoor rides aren’t being directly and fully captured by AT, as seems to be the case at present, then it’s more likely that the workouts it subsequently serves up for you are easier than your true capabilities (rather than harder, as you suggest).
That being the case, the system would eventually pick up on this when you did a workout by noting that (i) you’d passed (or perhaps super-passed, if that exists) the workout; and (ii) your response to the post-workout survey would tell it that you’d not struggled and indeed perhaps had found it easy. So next time you did a workout targeting that energy system / zone if could offer you one with a material bump up in the difficulty (Workout Level), hopefully closer to your actual capabilitiy.
So it’s far from a disaster: it mainly means that the system’s understanding of your abilities (the Progression Levels it has assigned you) will be less accurate, less timely (be laggy), reduced granularity, but depending on your individual use-case your experience might still be quite good with AT, especially if you intervened a little to help the system by completing Alternate workouts that you thought better represented your abilities and thus nudged your Progression Levels on track more quickly.
I strongly suspect that the “AT Roadmap” has all along being aiming to be ready for a Production release post-summer in the northern hemisphere, ie. at the time that a majority of the customer base switch to heavy use of TR.
Accounting correctly for work performed in outdoor rides is, I think, a tough nut to crack, and likely to be contentious regardless due to the complexity of it and because of subjective factors that aren’t present for indoor riding. Whatever the V1 release delivers, I imagine it could be a key area where refinements might be possible for a long time to come. Should be an interesting journey!
It “does” work for your outdoor rides, its just back door right now.
Try this next time;
Trainnow
select workout you want
push to garmin
start workout at begining of ride
ride outside however you want
end ride
AT takes it at that point
log in and leave required comment
TR and AT calculate it regardless if you followed the workout to a T or just did your thing
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That’s not really an AT issue though is it?
More of a following the plan thing. I mean, in terms of if you want to change short VO2 to long VO2 whether prescribed by a coach or TR, then the plan wasn’t the issue. AT would in theory be an aid here in terms of providing appropriate variants, and then accounting for the work done in the manner you prefer?
Not critiquing your training method, just trying to understand a different mindset.
I would say if you have set up your plan via plan builder you still have the options to pick alternate workouts that can line up with what you are aiming to do if it gives other suggestions.
I am in the beta but I really am more of an outside rider to enjoy riding at this point. I do typically do 2 inside workouts a week and they are set up for what I would normally do. AT is good at updating the PL going forward as I proceed on the workouts I am doing. My outside rides have no bearing on the PL so it is missing that aspect. Its a beta…just good to play with it to see what works and what doesnt.
Good question, I honestly don’t know and I don’t want to commit to AT w/o having a full understanding of everything it can/cannot do.
Here’s another scenario:
You finish a 4-week block that focuses on intervals at MAP (Max Aerobic Power) or more commonly known as VO2 max. (or, you finish Short Power Build if you’re following a TR plan.) After I’m done with this block/phase I’d like to work on raising my FTP from below with threshold work, but I don’t want to be forced to do a Specialty phase. Then what? Manually select a Build phase?
My understanding is that AT is really only beneficial if you’re following TR plans, and not doing your own self-coached interventions. Therefore I’m not sure AT is right for me. But for a lot of people I’m sure it’s going to be a great tool.
My gripe, if it’s valid is that AT (at least for now) only works within plan builder and when I set up a plan through the builder for my usual 16-20 week winter program it wants to stick me into specialty, and I don’t want to do specialty because I’m not training for a race I would rather do an extended Base and build but I can’t plop base and build manually on my calendar and take advantage of AT.
For now…
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You dont have to commit to AT. Just tweak it to get what you want. The adaptations do feel like they work better then TR previous plans.
What I have done…is I wanted a short power build segment…so I set up a race date, set up type of event, tweaked the date to get the start to happen when I wanted and voila…short power build incorporated into my dates as I wanted. Definitely not what TR is aiming for us to do at this point but otherwise I wouldnt be playing with it.
I have no intention to follow what they have done after this segment. I will just adjust it again. I really only truly follow a more typical plan from November to March.
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Ohhhhhhh, now that is an interesting idea when I’m on the power meter bike.
Thanks!
Two things:
(1) AT is in closed beta, and we should not judge it by the same standards as a finished product. Don’t expect something feature complete or fully working.
(2) And users opted into AT.
Of course, the purpose of beta testers is to find bugs, find edge cases and eventually bring it to production quality. Expectations need to be tempered in the early phase, some things might just be broken for a while or not yet implemented. Good beta testers factor this out (I used to do lots of beta testing 15 years ago). Other people, though, download the beta and expect a production quality product. Overall, I agree that scoring outdoor rides is a critical feature to make AT work effectively for a broad range of people — as a released product. As a beta, it is not critical, I think.
Overall, it seems the release of AT will take longer than anticipated and I like what TR is doing: they are making certain small features public (TrainNow, workout levels, alternate workouts). And they are taking their time, in a good way. We should give them time to get it right. And if you receive an invitation for the closed beta, understand what you are getting into. (In case you opt not to use it, feel free to forward your invitation to me 
)
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It’s currently June, so what you’ll be able to do scheduling-wise come winter probably isn’t super relevant today. 
However, should someone wish to be doing what you describe, today, they could likely accomplish something akin to that through a workaround by using PB to schedule an initial plan (including the Speciality part they’re not interested in), then once they’d completed the Base / Build phases delete that initial plan and schedule a second plan, again through PB, to give them additional Base / Build. For that second plan, some tweaking of the Start Date and experience level might be necessary to get it to output what they were seeking. NB I’ve done something a bit likethat just recently when I entered the AT beta in order to achieve the shape of plan that I wanted. YMMV.
As you allude to, hoop-jumping like that isn’t likely to be needed in the longer term, assuming the dependency of AT on PB disappears at some point, but it might offer a valid workaround now for someone in that position.
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One thing I think gets lost in the shuffle here is workout picking is like the least important thing about building a training plan. When Nate talks about not having coach’s pick workouts in the future I kind of chuckle because who cares. Take 4 or 5 workouts you like for various energy systems, rinse repeat. Mix up the stuff if you get bored.
The biggest place AT can gain is going to be the analysis side. And until it captures all work done, it’s really not going to do much. So that’s really why I could care less to be in it for the moment.
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Thanks, I’ve been wanting to say something like this for awhile.
A lot of hopes and dreams are being piled onto AT.
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I have been using AT exclusively outdoors and it works just fine. My only hangup from a functional perspective is that it needs an assessment, without one everything sets at a baseline of 1. Hopefully post-beta, that could be remedied with pulling against rider history and FTP in the system. But, to address your comment, you have to use the platform as designed. If you intend to take a workout outdoors, you have to select “Outside” in the app and it will push to your head unit. Upon completion and save, it will match fine with the prescribed workout and adjust your levels accordingly. If you’re referring to free rides, then no. AT doesn’t apply, nor would I expect it to. The machine learning is contingent on your ability to meet certain deliverables and to determine whether or not your are functionally overreaching or being unproductive. It has no idea what is going on in a free ride. It can’t rank your zone levels based on your 100 mile ride, it doesn’t know what the objectives are and if you were aiming at riding at sweet spot and were on a good day hitting threshold numbers for the same RPE, or if you were aiming to hit VO2 max and fell dismally short. Effectively that would be asking the system to guess what you were trying to do and without NeuraLink, that’s probably out of the question. I would argue it could probably do a better job scanning the ride to see if it matches what was scheduled for the day without using the integrated outside function, but that seems like a window dressings type of feature rather than a foundational one.
If you’re riding endurance, then populate an endurance workout that could be dead flat and just ignore the workout screen and ride to get “credit” toward endurance, but riding with the Thursday night chain gang isn’t going to update AT. At least not until it accounts for CTL and TSB in some capacity. I am not convinced that they are moving in that direction, but that is the only thing I could see value in with applying free rides to AT, adaptations contingent on measured fatigue. However, the design model of their plans seems almost to preclude it, the idea is not to assume fatigue based on traditional Fitness/Form/Fatigue numbers but rather real-time performance. I would guess this is not in the cards, but I won’t speak for the TR team…
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I’m glad you could verbalise that much more effectively than I.
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With more people commenting on how it works, I don’t think it would work for me. I ride outdoors A LOT and it sounds like AT can’t account for that as designed. Not really a flaw, I’m just not the intended user.
I was not impacted over the past year+ by being locked up inside, so that’s nothing I have experience with. I was still bike commuting every day 5 days a week and doing my normal outdoor rides. Hell, pandemic life was great for me with less people outside 
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What specific benefit do you envision coming from the analysis? Certainly it’s not just analysis for analysis’ sake. Shouldn’t some kind of action/decision result? If so, what would that be?
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I don’t think it’s “as designed”. The intention is certainly that AT will account for your outdoor work, whether structured or not. The issue right now is not all of that is in place - but it’s certainly part of the overall design and I’m certain they’ll deliver it at some point.
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That’s definitely not correct. Proper scoring of outdoor rides is on the agenda and a central piece of AT. I think there are very few TR users who exclusively ride indoors, especially the types who follow training plans. This feature just isn’t ready yet, not even for the closed beta. AFAIK only a small subset (only TR employees, I reckon) of the closed beta are testing this feature at the moment, because the kinks don’t seem to have been worked out.
That’s not correct, the feature you describe is definitely on the AT roadmap. It can’t know your intent, but it needn’t do that, because it knows what you did do. All it needs is to be able to judge your fitness. How are you dealing with repeated short efforts (e. g. small, steep climbs)? When you rotate, you’re doing over-unders. What about that that sprint at the end, how was your power then? Is this a hard problem? Yes. But the team already has an alpha version/internal beta working. AFAIK the same algorithm will be applied to custom workouts.
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