Looking for peoples experiences as to how plan builder suggests longer duration endurance workouts over the course of their training plan. I’ve performed several trials of building my plan and the workouts seem to be built at the threshold of what I input as my available time in the weekly template step of building the plan. I put in 5 hours of availability on Sunday and it just gave me 5 hour rides ever weekend. It will just match whatever time I put in. You can see in the attached images a rep from TrainerRoad says that it will suggest longer rides over the course of the plan. I imagine this would happen via suggested adaptations? As I write this I wonder if what I need to do is put in my max availability, like 5 hours, then it will suggest adaptions to shorten the scheduled 5 hour rides until I’m ready for them? I’m training for a trip with 5 hour rides in the mountains of France for 9 days. I am aware that long rides are not an absolute necessity, but I prefer to do long rides and feel better when I do. I have 20 years experience with structured training, but I don’t want to have to make manual adjustments to my plan if I don’t absolutely have to.
One of my main goals of this post is to better u destined all the details of trainer roads response in the attached images.
As a TrainerRoad user for going on 8 years, you will be MUCH better served if you change this mentality. You are your own coach and I strongly recommend you change workouts as you see fit based on your experience, likes/dislikes and life schedule. I get that you want to set and forget, but that will leave you with a less than optimal training plan.
Just take a few moments every Sunday to adjust the upcoming weeks training by using Alternates and/or duration. The training plan is a guide at best and in its current variant is quite conservative. I am constantly changing the workouts based on various factors. If you can do more, then do more. If you need to do less on the day, then do less. If the workout doesn’t fit your preference, use alternates until you find an interval structure you like, PLs makes this easy. There is nothing special about the workouts, just be consistent.
The duration of your scheduled workouts will be determined by a few things.
The max duration cap you set for that day of the week in Plan Builder
The workouts that are available to you based on your Progression Levels
Endurance workouts are a bit unique in that after a certain point, the only way to make them “harder” is to make them longer (aside from adding sprints).
There are a lot of Endurance workouts to pick from and there are lower-level workouts that are long, but they’re generally set at a lower intensity. Your current Endurance Progression Level is around 5 and there are 5-hour long rides within your capabilities based on your PLs, so if you tell the software that you’re willing to do endurance rides that are up to 5 hours long and it can find some to give you, it likely will.
For many who are in your shoes but have a lower Endurance PL, there won’t be really long workouts that respect that lower PL, so they’ll have to work up to those longer workouts while building up their PLs.
If you feel like 5 hours is too long right now, I’d adjust your duration cap to a shorter duration for the time being. Just remember that the lower-level 5-hour-long workouts are going to consist of a lower power output than the higher-level ones. I’m by no means saying that they’re easy, but if you actually follow the structure of the workout and fuel properly, you might be surprised by what you can do.
I’m afraid you’d have to. Even with the recent slight improvements, Plan Builder is still a super compromised tool, unfortunately. I don’t know it the tech behind it is super old (it’s functionality obviously is) and they can’t really improve on it or if they are completely blinded on that eye and focused solely on their workout levels and thinking that would be the fix to everything. At this stage it’s clear that longer zone 2 workouts or even a natural and sensible progression of those (which is by duration and not by inching them ever closer to the zone boundary to zone 3 as they always trying to do) is completely outside of the Trainerroad DNA.
