I don’t see Yellows as a bad thing, if anything assuming you’re recovering properly between 100+ TSS days I see it as great. I’ve had weeks since the beta AI with 3 yellow days. Got through all workouts without issue. The workouts have been spot on, I don’t feel like overreaching whatsoever.
If you blow through the yellow days and stack intensity on intensity, that’s an issue. But that’s what red days are for. That calendar looks perfectly reasonable to me for someone trying to get faster.
The AI appears to disagree with you here as the Threshold level is dropping throughout the cycle in the updated AI sim window indicating that it is seeing fatigue that is impacting workouts.
You often don’t see big jumps in FTP in the base season. It’s about building a robust engine which then enables training to make the bigger gains.
To give an example: in the base season (3 months from October to December) my FTP only went from 290 to 300. In the first 4 weeks of my “build" phase it went up to 310 and is predicting another 10-15 in the next 4 weeks.
Keep plugging away. If you can, do the base season outside - it’s much more enjoyable.
I was agreeing with Kevs assessment that fatigue appears to be at play. If his threshold levels are dropping down From 4.5 to 3.5 then 2.5 to me that indicates that he may have too many yellow days and would explain why his FTP isn’t going up as fast.
Have you used the “Check Volume” feature? In my recent experience, it seems the new TR AI tools really emphasizes quality workouts over pure volume. In my case, removing an easy endurance day significantly boosted my FTP prediction (at least until I got sick and missed two key workouts). My suspicion is that the AI is seeing all those endurance workouts as junk mileage that is adding fatigue without a real benefit to FTP.
I wonder what happens if you get rid of one of those 30 minute rides. If you are fresher for the threshold rides and it ramps them up. Like skip Friday’s 30 minute ride. Delete it.
I was doing 3 hard days last year and ended up peaking a bit and carrying lots of fatigue. I seem to be progressing a lot more with 2 hard days a week instead. So maybe you are overdoing it a bit and it leads to some hard days not being as good as they would be with more recovery.
I’m also not a masters athlete and have been doing great on the master’s plan this winter. 2 days of intensity is plenty especially with how the AI is prescribing high Z2 (debatable tempo) work now.
I’ve updated the plan to do 2 hard days per week, which is against the recommendation of the AI. I now have 1 threshold workout per week and 1 sweet spot, all 3 of my upcoming workouts are the exact same 2.5 difficulty level when I’m currently doing 3.4
