Are trainer road plans worth it for outdoor training?

In your Garmin settings

Now with more good weather, I do almost all longer (than an hour) Z2 rides outdoors, using a TR workout pushed to my Edge 520 as a rough guide, but mostly so the ride can more easily be used by TR to tweak suggestions. The only big difference that I can see between TR’s outsude Endurance workouts is duration.

I also have found it a fun challenge sometimes to do more intense intervals outside, also using TR workouts, when I’m able to match up local terrain more or less with the intervals. If @SeanHurley is still hanging out, or anyone who knows, I have a question about how TR’s machine learning sees safety-driven pauses in rest intervals or even in work intervals on outside workouts. I may misunderstand why TR sometimes gives you the lap key to start a prescribed interval after an indeterminate rest, and other times does not, and just starts recording the work even if it’s not where you want to do it. If I see a situation like that coming up, I often just pause the Edge 520 itself until I’m where I need to be, Do frequent pauses like this affect how TR evaluates the whole ride? Or to use Sean’s example of going back and forth on a short stretch to accumulate a longer interval: if the turnaround is tricky or dangerous, is the workout more skewed by pausing the work interval at the turnarounds, or by letting it run while I slow down, maybe even briefly stop to change directions safely?

Thanks.

Any specific answer I give will be rapidly obsolete, because how Adaptive Training handles outside workouts is a big point to development behind the scenes and is not yet fully implemented. But indoors, pausing during a recovery period to stretch or use the bathroom won’t affect how AT judges your completion of the workout, and neither will short back pedals or variations during work intervals. As a general principle, outside workouts are always expected to be less consistent and more flexible than a workout done indoors due to the huge number of variables that occur on the road. And of course if you disagree with the ML’s conclusion that you had trouble completing a workout, you can overrule it on the post-workout survey.

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Thanks! Makes sense, and it’s great that TR is working hard on how to get ML more cunning in evaluating outside rides in light of so many variables.

I should have clarified that I don’t see the post-workout surveys because, although eligiible for it, I haven’t switched over to AT yet because my experience of TrainNow has been so rewarding in my case, with none of the beta bugs or bloopers, and I don’t have some crucial event to build up to. Even without whatever additional horsepower AT has, TrainNow has been consistently and cannily giving me what seem to me to be Goldilocks suggestions in more intense workouts – ones I can complete, but just barely, and without being laid up for 2 days afterwards. It feels like a much more collaborative enterprise for me than the old fixed plans did, where I either lived up to expectations (maybe based on much younger people) or flunked. 4.95 stars for the new deal!

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Only worth it if you want to get faster :joy:

What are you using for a power meter? If you have power meter pedals you could put them on the peloton (I think) and just do the ramp test. Then you could do the rest of your workouts outside with that FTP. I used to put my Garvin Vector 3 on a spin bike at work so I could continue training when I was away for two weeks at a time. It wasn’t as good as being on my trainer at home but better than nothing.

30’s. Only been riding for a year. I don’t swim, run or row. Sur I could do an easy ride per week, I just haven’t historically. Terrain isn’t very steep. Around 1600 vertical on a 30 mile ride. Just not lots of hills around.

Yeah for sure. I wish I had a nice quiet 5 minute stretch nearby, but I struggle even to find that, and it is mostly flat. The good roads are a longer ride to get to, and just not practical for a morning 1-hour workout timeframe. But I do still enjoy those outside workouts when it works.

I have a 1-hour imperfect morning-ride loop - Imperfect in that even though it is quite open past the 15-mins warmup section, there are still some stop signs, and some undulations in the road that sometimes fit well with intervals, sometimes really don’t. But it’s still a cracker to get out there early and just rip those intervals. I did a VO2Max session indoor this morning, and I was amazed at how much easier and more fun it is to do those outside.

I do step over parts of recoveries between sets sometimes to better match with what’s ahead on the road, and stretch them other times.

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I live in a hilly area, not high elevation gain - maybe 250m from lowest point to highest - but there’s a lot of variety of grades from 2-3% all the way up to 20%+. There’s very, very little flat. Threshold intervals up to 15mins and VO2max intervals are relatively easy to find, locations for twenty minute Sweetspot are rarer than hen’s teeth.

This morning I did Cayambe which is 9 x 2mins at 126%, a 5% grade makes that perfectly doable. The downside is that I’m almost better at going uphill than on the flat!

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I haven’t done an indoor ride since March, and still find TR’s plans and especially their outside workouts on Wahoo to be well worth it. Plus I like to support the podcast.

I do need to retest my FTP, so I will need to hop on the trainer for that.

Like some others that replied, my philosophy on the difficulty of nailing long intervals with stoplights or rolling hills is, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” That said, you can use it as a challenge, exploring the area to find the optimal uninterrupted and safe stretch for sweet spot or threshold.

I have a horribly difficult time getting good compliance on the outdoor workouts in my area. And now on AT, I seem to be making very little forward progress because of it. That being said, if I were stuck inside all week on the trainer doing workouts when it’s nice out, I’d probably have already sold all my bikes and bought a motorcycle,

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I’ve never seen intervals so evident in my own power data! Nice!!