I’m new to TrainerRoad. Long time triathlete looking to move focus to mostly cycling, thought I’d give TrainerRoad a try.
Planning on a gran fondo ride in August. Full century ride with ~7k feet of climbing. Generated a training plan, plugging in the century as my A event. Very surprised that the plan has a generic 1 hr Sunday endurance ride every week leading up to the event. Zero long rides are on the calendar.
Every plan I’ve followed progressively built in long rides/runs leading up to the event. I am not confident in this plan if I’m only being prescribed 1 hr rides leading up to a 100 mile event,
Am I missing something? TR might not be for me.
Thanks!
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Welcome to the TR community!
Plan Builder will start by building you out a plan that “meets you” where you’ve been at in terms of volume/intensity lately. Plan Builder then creates a plan for you that will be sustainable based on your recent training.
If you haven’t been doing longer rides in a bit, Plan Builder won’t have those longer sessions plugged in by default.
As you move through your plan, you can “Check” your plan’s volume (instructions here). If you handle the training stress of your original plan well, Plan Builder may increase your volume as you increase your fitness.
You can also schedule in longer rides manually by using Workout Alternates, TrainNow, or by browsing our Workout Library.
Finally, while long rides can be helpful in prepping for longer events, they aren’t totally necessary. Most of your fitness will come by targeting the energy systems you’ll be using the most during your Fondo through interval training. Long rides can still help you out with testing your equipment and nutrition strategies (plus they’re usually pretty fun!), but too many of them can derail the rest of your plan – especially if they pile on too much extra training stress. The following article has more info if you’re interested:
Hope that helps clear things up – feel free to let us know if you have any additional questions!
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Thanks for the quick reply. Really feels strange to delete weekend rides from my schedule. Longish sat/sun rides, throwing in some hills or simply focusing on endurance, with a friend or solo, has been a staple. And to not tackle hills irl before a fondo with a large amount of time climbing is disconcerting. Would it be reasonable to add in rides when they come up on weekends and let TR AI handle the potential impact on the upcoming week with slight scheduling modifications?
And, just so I’m clear, TR doesn’t have a way to structure training plans that have long rides baked-in up front?
Thanks!
If you edit your training plan (right click on one of the headers for a plan phase start), you should be given a listing of the days of the week, along with a field showing the longest ride that would be scheduled foe that day. You can then increase/decrease the available time and regenerate your plan. TR may not initially give you workouts of the full length that you input, but it should work up to that length, provided it feels you’re handling the load acceptably. (Keep in mind that TR is designed largely for time-constrained people, so it generally replaces longer rides with shorter rides with a higher training load.)
You can certainly add in longer weekend rides as they come up – Red Light Green Light will keep your plan on track if your future workouts need adjusting due to those weekend rides.
As @NigelTufnel11 said, if you edit your plan’s volume to include longer rides, you may not start out with longer rides included by default, but your plan will “work up” to them. You may have to ignore volume/intensity warnings to modify your plan in that manner. We don’t necessarily recommend doing so as it could put you at risk for too much volume/intensity too soon. Using the “Check Volume” button I described above would be the “safer” way to get your Plan Builder plan to dish out more volume as you work through it.
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If you have the time and the experience from prior plans, FWIW as a long time TR user, I’d say do the long outdoor rides with the progression over time. You’ll get to practice many things that you can’t with the shorter TR workouts. You may be trained up to a certain point strictly following the TR plan but I don’t believe you’d be trained as well as you could be.
It’s not just about increasing volume. You’ll serve yourself well by getting out there and dialing in nutrition, hydration, handling, pacing, riding under fatigue, mental toughness, etc. In my experience, TR doesn’t help well with these things and I never felt as optimal as I should have when I relied solely on the platform.
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If long rides are already part of your normal routine, I’d err on the side of keeping them. Particularly if you have been doing other high intensity work in addition to the long rides. The biggest concern is getting overwhelmed by additional training stress as TR introduces high intensity structured sessions. If you were only doing long rides and you keep them while throwing in a bunch of new high intensity work, that could create a quick ramp in training stress that you can’t absorb.
When starting out, TR is going to default to being very conservative. That’s great for someone totally new to training, but sometimes not so great for someone with a bunch of experience and history of endurance training. Don’t assume its carefully looking at all your training history and giving you appropriate workouts to start. It will eventually catch up and right size the plan, but I wouldn’t hesitate to push it along to align somewhat with what you’ve been doing historically. TR provides nice tools to pick alternate workouts and add additional volume as needed.
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Yep. Missing you don’t need 5 hours of indoor training to ride a century.
My fist century back in the days of pre ai (base, build , specialty) I didn’t get a ride on TR for longer than 2 hours. Very few I finished. At the time I was a single dad with 3 kids. Someone always wanted eat!
I went outside for 40-50 miles. Figured out my bottles and what fueling and when. All worked out.
Especially considering the roads weren’t closed. Thus, stop lights. And feed zones.
As I progressed I started planning which feed zones I’d skip. Whose wheel I wanted to hold because the same group crushed me.
Long story short, trust the plan. And indoor training you are constantly peddling unlike the being outside.
Have a good ride and keep us posted. Welcome to TR. Truly one of the best platforms.
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In my experience, trust the process.
My last 24hr solo mtb xc race was completed on 7hrs a week xc training, with rides of no more than 2hrs in duration.
I completed the event, covered 258 miles on a tight XC course and had a great result too.
The caveat is that I’m a seasoned endurance racer, but TR has elevated me from completing to competing.
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This is super helpful. I was going to post a question on why I don’t have any long training rides in my plan as I get ready for upcoming gravel races that are about 60 miles and 6K ft of climbing. I’ve done fewer long rides up to this point in the season but yesterday went out and did a 70 miles ride with 5K climbing - and felt good. I agree that hard structured riding indoors is 1.5 -2X as hard as riding outside. I am not new to racing or training and am currently riding 8-10 hours/week with two hard structured days, and three endurance days -one of which I am replacing with a longer ride outside of 3.5-4 hrs. I will acknowledge that it is surprising how much of an impact all of these Z2 workouts have had on my fitness. That said I feel like I need a weekly long ride for all the reasons others have stated here (including technical downhills on a gravel bike). Appreciate all the good input here. Oh - I’m 68 and live at 8K in Colorado so most of my training is done at ‘elevation’.
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Have you specified in your TR training plan that you have enough time to do longer rides? I’m have found that the ‘default’ training time in TR (especially for older athletes) is pretty short (maybe a couple of hours). So you might need to edit your plan and change the max time for a couple of the days. Or you might try running the ‘Check Volume’ function to see if that changes anything.
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Thanks Nigel. I didn’t know there was setting for daily time limits. I’ve just been using ‘edit’ to put in longer rides on days that work for me. I am currently at 5 days/week which TR has determined is ‘aggressive’ or something like that. I do have plenty of long rides in my history over the last many years - but I am using TR to see if a more focused/structured approach would make my fitness higher or at least more predictable. So I’m trying to find a balance - fewer longer rides per week - with more structure.
I feel like I am st least somewhat in the same situation as you. I’m not sure how long you’ve been using a TR training plan, but I’m about 3 months in (I started with TR the day after the Zwift integration was announced). At the outset the plan felt very light, especially compared to what I had been doing. But now, after a couple of AI FTP updates, and a ‘Check Volume’ change, I feel like I’m about in the right place.
I think I started with TR giving me about 7 or 7.5 hours per week, which then changed to 9 or 9.5 after my first FTP change, and then to 11 after my Check Volume update. The longest ride I have is 3 hours, which is still a fair amount shorter than the events I plan to do, but I think the amount of intensity makes up for that. And because I’m doing 5 of the workouts each week on the trainer, there’s no letup, like there would be outside.
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I started about 2 months ago - first race is in late June. I have seen an improvement in FTP and HRV is running about 10-15% higher - but resting HR is a few beats higher than normal. So fitter - but also somewhat fatigued perhaps.
Did TR add the 3 hour ride, and did you do it on the trainer?
Yes, TR put the 3 hour (outdoor) ride into the plan after the ‘Check Volume’ was run. I have switched it to be an indoor ride if the weather isn’t cooperating, and it remains a 3 hour (endurance) workout of comparable TSS.
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