I am using TrainerRoad for the first time. Every year I enter an event called the Fred (Whitton) which is 114 mile mountain sportive in Cumbria. In previous years my training has consisted of long endurance rides but relatively low intensity turbo sessions during the week. TrainerRoad is giving me quality mid week turbo sessions but very low volume for the weekend endurance riding. I know this is about adaption but right up until the event the volume remains on the low side. Should I be worried? Is the endurance volume going to be sufficient? Am I missing something?
I had the same concern when I first started. One of my first ever races was an event that took me ~7 hours but TR never gave me anything over 1.5 hours. Based off advice from a friend I trusted the process and stuck with the recommended workouts (mostly 1 hour intense rides during the week), and ended up feeling quite strong consistently for the entire 7 hour event.
I wouldn’t assume thats the case for everyone but my experience was definitely positive!
Thanks @Scott_Muhlestein, that helps to reassure. if ChatGPT was able to lose its patience it’d already told me to F&@# off ages ago based on the number of times I have asked the same question. It just feels so counterintuitive but, one thing is for sure the tougher weekday sessions don’t leave much scope for longer weekend rides either, even on the masters setting (due to age).
I’m training for longer events, but I just manually swap out at least one weekend ride for a longer ride. As an athlete in his 50s, I make sure to get two intensity sessions and least one long ride, but I think that can be personal preference. I guess it matters as if you’re a long ride on the weekend stops you from training for your next workout. I think a lot of people try to do a ride at least half as long as the longest distance of the race but once again one training approach.
While my experience is that TR will do a great job of giving you the fitness for longer events, even with the limited volume, there are some things fir which more saddle time can be helpful, like dialing in nutrition/hydration and just getting used to being on the bike that long. This doesn’t end to happen every weekend, though, and it doesn’t need to be intense. So you might just do one or two longer rides each month, rate them appropriately, and then let TR adjust future workouts as it sees fit. (Just be sure to not put in too much volume too close to your event.)
Do you have your endurance rides set to dynamic endurance? And you can set your endurance zone to aggressive. Both of those things will lead to you get progression of longer endurance rides.
So you are likely to get good gains from a change in training approach, but you don’t want to get disheartened by failing workouts or not seeing improvement, so you will be broken in gently. Recovery is as important as stimulus, so you’ll want to see how well you are handling this load then add short 30 min rides on your recovery days. Use the Check Volume feature, plan with different Plan settings and approaches throughout the coming months to see what is working best for you. Whichever plan you’ve got, it might be worth setting your weekend Endurance ride to Dynamic.
As an Ironman triathlete I can vouch for lower time in the saddle. TR works to get you as fit as Timmy can be, if longer or shorter rides do this, that’s what it will recommend.
To add to what others have said … other than the overall training rhythm and types of ride, don’t look more than 4 weeks ahead, because the actual workouts (and some of the durations) will change as you go along.
You want to do as aydraper says, adjusting the hours in the calendar to show the time you have available on the days you want long rides, and setting to dynamic endurance so it will progressively lengthen your endurance rides. Jonathan discussed this in detail in the last podcast (I think it was this last week, he was talking about his training for Leadville).
I like the idea of setting the endurance riding to aggressive, that would definitely help to increase the endurance during. I was already set to Dynamic Endurance. I know what’s coming, I’ve done the Fred every year for the last 13, and ironically, like Jonathan at Leadville, I’m trying to get round in under 7 hours too, however I’m a bigger rider 85kg and the wrong side of 60… time and tide and all that.
This is why the change in training approach has thrown me somewhat.
Hitting your weekly internal/intensity sessions is top priority, but I’m a big proponent of adding as much volume as you can absorb on top of that. And as long as you ramp into the volume and allow for recovery, I think master’s athletes can push a lot more training stress than most people think. Time crunched training can take you a long way, but more training is better (assuming you have the time/desire and you can adapt to the training stress).
For me, I can stay pretty fit on ~10 hours per week, but my fitness/durability goes to the next level with high volume training. I can have fun racing on 10 hours of training, but I need high volume to be competitive. I’m 57 and I’ll ramp up to ~20 hours and 1000+ TSS at the peak of my season. And I’ll concentrate most of that training stress into 3-4 days per week and give myself some easy/rest time between those long days. By the time my target events roll around, a 300+ TSS ride w/ 5-6 hours on the bike feels like a normal ride with plenty left in the tank. I think the key is to ramp volume slowly over multiple years, not try to go from ~500tss weeks to consistent 1000+tss weeks over a single season. It’s probably not an approach that works with job/kids/busy life, but I’m retired these days and love spending a few days a week on the bike during my race season.
The high training volume doesn’t move my FTP up much, but my ability to ride strong deep into races is dramatically improved. I honestly don’t know how much of it is physiological vs. the other stuff (mental, fueling, comfort on the bike, etc.), I just know that when I push big training hours that I do much better deep into long races. If I focused on 1-4 hour races, I don’t know that the volume would make a significant performance difference. But I target longer events. There are plenty of guys in my age group who are stronger than me in a ~60 mile gravel race, but they tend to fade when the distances push past 100+ miles. Durability/endurance is the main card I have to play against many of these faster guys.
I’d say that keeping your two hard workouts a week alongside that Dynamic Endurance workout on Sundays is a great place to start. You don’t need tons of volume to prep you for a long event. You can get all of the aerobic stimulus you need from shorter workouts.
Those Dynamic Endurance workouts will ramp you up to longer easy rides leading up to your event, and those can be good for getting longer bits of time in the saddle to build some mental strength as well as conditioning your body to take in fuel and put out power for longer durations.
Sounds like you’re in for an adventure! Enjoy the ride!
