Hi there, I am filling in my calendar for next year’s XCO season. It is quite a short season with 6 races over 10 weeks. I am wondering how to assign A and B races in this situation…would it make most sense to make my A event the first or last race, or somewhere in the middle? The season begins in May and I will begin training on Sept 1st.
I will be doin the low volume masters plan supplemented with 2 days of unstructured riding at weekends. Any advice appreciated!
Hey @XCO_mtb,
Welcome to the forum! 
Good question here! I’d say if there are any particular races that are more important to you than others, I’d make them your A races. Just remember that A races need to be at least 8 weeks apart.
Otherwise, if you aren’t really going to prioritize your performance in any specific races, I’d say it’s probably best to put that A race towards the end of the season.
Also, don’t forget that you can bake those unstructured rides into your training plan now with the Solo/Group Rides feature! Take a look at the support article below if you’re interested.
HI @eddie
I have approx 6 XC races per season, all of equivalent importance, thus they cannot be assigned as either an A or B race.
Most of them occur within 6 weeks of each other, thus none can be assigned as A races due to the limitation imposed by the TR calendar.
So what is TRs solution to this?
If I assigned them all as B races - how does the Calendar handle an A vs a B race?
eg; is there a different taper period for an A vs B race? or does it only rely on the expected TSS of the race vs the A/B classification?
So I have an XC marathon on 30 Aug - I have added this as a B race (because it won’t let me add it as an A which it really should be)
It asked if I wanted to Keep my existing plan or Train for this event, I selected to Keep my current plan.
But - what it also should have asked is whether I wanted to Modify my existing plan to take into account this event - eg; by assigning the following day as a Recovery day.
Obviously it didn’t do this - why not?
Is it because it’s an A and not a B race?
Thanks
Fergal
Hey,
While not all of your 6 XC races can be A races, some of them can as long as you’re leaving 8 weeks between the ones you’ve selected as top priority. Even if you feel like all of these are the same priority, it will likely help to pick a few to make A races. This will allow you to get into the Specialty phase and really fine-tune your fitness.
Also, you should be able to make that August 30th race an A race, since it’s almost 8 weeks after your previous A race. Are you having issues with this?
We’ve put these measures in place for a reason, as it’s not practical to try to hold a true peak for too long. You really need a few weeks to recover, build back, and sharpen before peaking again after a hard race. That doesn’t mean that you won’t have solid fitness along the way, but to truly peak for an event, we’ve decided that 6 weeks between events is best.
In terms of how we treat A vs B vs C races, check out the Help Center article below.
Essentially, it goes like this:
- A Events - TrainerRoad will add a taper for the event and an opener workout the day before the event (if you’ve enabled this option in the Plan Builder flow).
- B Events - TrainerRoad will add an opener workout the day before the event (if you’ve enabled this option in the Plan Builder flow).
- C Events - These events are essentially training/workouts; no taper is involved, so TrainerRoad will remove any scheduled workouts on this day.
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Whoops! 
I miscounted there. That race is one day shy of the 8-week requirement between A races.
I’m curious, would it let you schedule it as an A race on the 31st? 
In my experience, it can be better to approach a condensed race series a bit differently than how you might peak for a single target race. The problem with truly hitting a peak is that performance can suffer in the run up to the peak (lots of progressive overload required to a hit a peak) and also on the way back down after the peak. For me, treating a race series like an extended specialty training phase makes a lot of sense. You aren’t killing yourself like you would during a build phase, but doing enough work to maintain most of the fitness you created during build while sharpening that fitness for races. You just have to be smart about scheduling “mini-tapers” into the plan where you don’t ever have a long taper, but you don’t show up on race day with acute fatigue. If your races are on saturday, don’t be loading on a bunch of training stress on thursdays or fridays on race weeks. So yeah, you’ll never hit a race at your peak with this approach, but you will be doing all the races at a pretty high level of fitness. I don’t know the best way to set up a TR to follow that approach (manually copy specialty phases?), but that’s the approach I’d take. And for what it’s worth, I’ve never taken this approach for a series like that over 10 weeks, but I have done it for ~7 weeks for a handful of races and it worked out well.
And all of that assumes you want to optimize your overall series result. If the goal is to optimize for single race, then be all in on that race and make it your A race (accepting that the results in other races are likely to suffer a bit).
Thanks @grwoolf , some good info and advice there especially regarding mini tapers.
I generally never have an A race, we have a national XC series comprised of approx 6 races running from approx April to end June/early July, they all have the same level of importance for competitors.