Base 2 vs Sustained Power Build LV - What's the difference?

Training
1

My target events are longer gravel races and climbing road races, so Plan Builder w/ AT has me in the sustained power build. Interestingly, SSB2 and Sustained Power Build look very similar for LV plans, 1xV02, 1xSS, & 1xThreshold. The only difference I see is that the V02 intervals are a longer in duration for the build block. Should it be this way? I thought that maybe each workout was supposed to be a little easier for the base block, but they’re not. I’m in base 2 now, and of this week’s three intensity days, I marked one as very hard, one as hard, and one as all-out (I actually failed this one but accidentally tricked AT into thinking I passed it). It was a tough week. Surprisingly, AT has next week’s workouts set to be even harder. Should I be going this hard in base??

Either way, the back and forth between base and build for my current plan is getting repetitive, so I might sacrifice the specificity and throw in general build for some variety. I’m itching to test my legs on some anaerobic workouts.

2

I echo your question on the diff. To me the only diff is Sustained actually gets easier (and is the lowest TSS build plan) with a swapping of threshold and SS on the longer day.

For the level increase, I presume LV / AT is pricing in that you have a lot of rest and that you can take a harder ramp rate then if you were in Mid Vol.

3

Base part 2 can also be thought of as “pre-build”, i.e. somewhere between Base and Build so a bit more intense than Base part 1 but not as intense as Build itself.

Given the number of permutations between Base and the various Build plans I’m sure there’s going to be some inconsistencies.

I’ve swapped SSBLV2 for Polarised Base Mid Volume (it’s actually just called the 6 week plan but the notes refer to it as “base”) - the VO2max workouts are easy but the threshold workouts are anything but :cold_sweat:, I’m nearly 6 months out from my intended ‘A’ event (a 900km MTB race) so there’s simply no need to be doing hard VO2max workouts at the moment.

I’m not sure that in the Calendar you can swap out plans from different stages of the process, i.e. you can’t replace a Speciality plan with a Base or Build. You can change the volume and swap out for another plan from the same phase.