One season later, AT is out of Beta, but it’s still a bit…wonky…for these critical race sessions.
Description of todays’ Brick workout: In the midst of a 1hr45min bike workout, you’ll sustain 90 minutes of effort between 80-85% FTP pushing you very close to the effort you’ll try to hold during your race-day bike leg. Then, you’ll dismount and transition quickly into your running gear right before you take off on a 60-minute run at a Easy-Moderate, RPE6 pace and grow a little more accustomed to a longer run this time around.
What actually happened: The workout was Gibraltar -2. “105 minutes of continuous riding where you’ll spend 90 minutes between 75-80% FTP.”
Now, I was all ready to blame AT for this, but then I noticed that Gibraltar -2 is listed as a Breakthrough workout at 6.2, whereas I’m at 2.8 for Tempo. That’s an usually large gap.
So does this mean that:
AT is now smart enough to keep away from these key sessions (to avoid the problem linked earlier!), and whoever made the training plan made a mistake.
AT adapted the key session, but for whatever reason was OK with making it a breakthrough.
In any case, for these key sessions, I’d prefer AT not modify the difficulty away from race pace. If I can’t maintain this power, or it’s way too easy, I’d prefer to find out about this now and not in the race.
Yes this is correct, AT will schedule you ‘Breakthrough’ workouts from time to time. Training is meant to push you occassionaly!
As always though, specifics about your workouts, adaptations, and Progression Levels are best served to the team at support@trainerroad.com. They have visibility to the full scope of your ride logs, adaptation history, PL changes, etc. They’ll have the most accurate advice and insight, and be able to apply any fixes if needed. Cheers.
There is absolutely nothing specific about this question. It’s a general one: does AT adapt the race simulations / brick workouts or not? If it does, as you seem to be saying, that’s actually undesirable, and it causes the mismatches in the descriptions of brick workouts like in the first post.
If it doesn’t, it’s a simple mistake in the workout description (that I can point out to support).
Happy to clarify. Brick workouts can receive adaptations but those adaptations vary greatly in severity depending upon those aforementioned specificities within AT, and theres no general formula of ‘every brick workout is be adapted in ‘x’ way for everyone’.
The why behind those adaptations, being served which workout at a level in relation to your PLs, and if/how adaptations take place during a certain week (and in your case, phase), or for a brick workout are extremely individual and require the full scope of your workout compliance.
Thank you. That means the workout text description for the brick is almost always going to be wrong though, as they refer to specific workouts (and were likely written before AT).
