Hmmmmmm, hopefully your incorporating something that helps all of us older cyclists with plan building as that’s been talked about for a couple of years now, both here and on the podcast.
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Thanks for your response. It’s awesome how active you guys are on the forum.
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I’m grandfathered in at the $99 rate, so even if I were using it minimally, I would probably keep TR. However, I think I have a few more years of usage and gains to reap before I consider dropping the subscription. I haven’t really used the newer features so I haven’t quite found the value over my grandfathered rate. I definitely wouldn’t resubscribe at $189, that’s too steep for my blood.
@Nate_Pearson Thanks so much for answering here. Can’t wait for ‘thing1’. Pretty sure it will be awesome.
Are you thinking about any type of loyalty discount for the second year for newer subscribers?
It leaves a bit of a bitter aftertaste for me that people who signed up two years ago payed 188$ (2x 99$) and will pay looking forward 99$ as well. I paid 189$ for my first year - which I’m totally fine with because I’m OK as a late joiner to pay my 'buy in". So I paid an almost equal amount compared to a two year subscriber towards the past developments (actually 1 $ more…) - yet going forward I’m asked to pay double.
Obviously I accept a no as an answer since this is clearly your business decision and you have to do what’s best for the company 
.
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Do what’s best for you and your family, and stay safe.
I’m actually a boomerang customer…signed up with TR a number of years ago, used it quite a bit, then thought I could coach myself (spoiler alert: nope) and cancelled my subscription.
What I really needed was the structure. I need a calendar with a plan that someone, even a PlanBuilder, gives me – I just execute.
Now I’m back, grandfathered at $129, and loving it. I love the structure. I love the ability to drop in some random crazy events (a sprint duathlon in December followed by Ride Across Florida in spring 2021) and let the plan builder figure it out. I love the feeling that I am supporting some customer focused, passionate guys.
I’m blessed that I can afford both TR and Zwift right now. I get value from both – TR is a serious training tool, Zwift is fun – but if I had to pick only one to keep it would be TR.
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Agree, but TR don’t own the copyright to certain styles of workouts. They have say 2 X 20 min SS intervals in the library. These are classic sessions. TR did not discover these sessions. In fact I think a lot of the workouts are based on sessions by Coggan, Friel etc. A lot of the TR workouts are just classic sessions that any coach would use/prescribe to their athletes. The base, build, speciality again was not created by TR but had been prescribed by coaches for years. What TR have done is package it up on in an accessible easy way for people to access and charged accordingly for the service.
So whilst I agree, to copy every workout in a TR plan and use them is not cool and you should pay TR if you want to use their workouts and plans, I think what people are saying it’s that there are only a few actual variants of workouts in the plans. Endurance, SS, Threshold VO2 etc. For an experienced user it is easy to create your own unique workouts.
So TR have effectively taken workouts that were already widely used by coaches, tweaked them based on their experience and put them into cookie cutter training packages available to subscribers. There is nothing “unique” about the workouts.
But I agree, if you want to use TR or a coach, you should pay for that service. But also, you can create your own workouts based on your experience of using TR to construct your own workouts and training plans.
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Quick search of the library shows: Buffalo -2, Eclipse -1, Eclipse -2, Eclipse -3, Eichorn, Galena -1, Galena -2 and Wrangell. I also took out Cartago and Cathedral as they are long workouts with 2 20 minute intervals in the middle of them.
As has been said in the past on here “there are only so many ways you can ride an interval” so to have 8 options which all have very slight differences seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Totally. But the point was by copying TR workouts you are infringing their copyright. TR don’t own the copyright to the protocol of 2 X 20 workouts or any variation on that theme. In fact a lot of the workouts here are based off the work of others.
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That is about as ludicrous a claim as those that are going around in the music world where because someone had one note followed by another then they were the ones that came up with it out of thin air.
No they didnt. Theres only so many ways you can arrange intervals into time. Everything builds on something that was before it and Coggan et al were not the first to come up with it either.
I’m a self confessed fan of TR, but to simplify it to SS workouts is missing the point a little.
For me TR provides:
All workouts to save me time creating them
Progression over weeks
Having a plan (that I can modify) increases my compliance
Having TR control the workout (erg) also increases my compliance
Simple to use and the tech “just works”
Even though I’m Grandfathered in I’d still pay the $189 (just don’t tell Nate 
), as that would still make it average less than $1 per workout for me.
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I’m working on a larger opinion piece of TR, and you sort of stumbled on a bit of it.
There’s a German word I learned while studying design: gesamtkunstwerk. [Ges-AMT-koontz-verk]. Literally “total artwork,” broadly speaking it means a work of art that’s made up of all media. Put another way, a classic architect just designs a house, for instance. Gesamtkunstwerk would be creating the house, the interior decoration, the floor coverings, the silverwear and dinnerset, the bath fittings, and everything else to build out a total ‘experience.’
In a way, that’s sort of how I view TR. It’s true that ultimately, “Spend increasing time working hard near your threshold” isn’t necessarily a brilliant, unique, novel concept. I think it’s a bit ethereal, but once you start taking a look at the overall package and system, you start getting into where they add value. Is it copyrightable? Who knows, not my area. Is it moral? That’s a big question. But yeah, put simply, I think if you use the trial period to get in, copy a bunch of workouts, then bail, eh, feels dirty to me.
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try a plan
why would you expect more from the product? the price has stayed the same for you in those 5 years so your actually paying less in real terms and still getting what you signed up for. Anything they do to improve TR is a bonus imo.
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I don’t disagree. You can’t copyright intervals.
TRs ‘killer’ feature is its simplicity. I’ve come into it at 4.4 w/KG and not expecting to make big gains. What it gives me is quick plan building, the ability to adjust the plan or tweak individual workouts but remain accountable to execute these. This is particularily great when confined to working from home, no bike commuting (6-8 hours per week) and can’t currenty ride outside. The local gym with wattbikes is asking £110 per month - there is still a lot of value here (for me).
Then there is supporting the overall eco-system, the podcast, the forum, the blogs, & if everyone decided these are free - they wouldn’t exist.
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That time of year for me… going to stick with it for another year in hope of the promised significant update mentioned by @Nate_Pearson above. 
Prediction: Machine-learning based plan-builder with automatic/adaptive updates to plan as workouts are missed and/or if you want additional volume. That’s my hope, anyway. So much data potential! 
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This would be a good thing.
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