How does TR determine "successful" Outside Workouts for Adaptive Training?

[cyclhist]

I usually do all my training indoors, but am on a 3-month work trip abroad and bringing a trainer was not an option this time. Fortunately, there is an uninterrupted big piece of road circuit I can use for workouts. But I have some questions and at least one problem:

1. Garmin Edge 530 seems to have just skipped the last 50s work interval in a workout. It shows up as a lap, but when I ramped up to do it I was surprised to see that it said time to go 3:30 or whatever the last rest was.

2. The workout was hard, and it’s hard to do vo2max on the road, so obviously there were power fluctuations. Yet, I didn’t think I did such a bad job considering (okay, one interval I had to get around a pedestrian who wasn’t looking where they were going. obviously being considerate is more important than nailing your numbers).

3. Adaptive training said “that looked tough, why did you struggle.” I am not sure I did, but if the workout failed it’s because the road is uneven, there’s some ups and downs, there’s some wind, so power fluctuates. Maybe I get better at this, but for now I don’t want the workouts to get easier.

4. Adaptive training wants to make the next workouts easier.

I guess I am trying to figure out if this is intended behavior or if outside workouts are still a bit broken. I am attaching a screenshot because my profile is private.

Since I can only work out outside, should I disable adaptive training for now?

[ellotheth]

I’m replacing the easier workouts with higher-level alternates.

I did a Threshold 4.6 workout outside yesterday, and even though my average interval power and NP hit all the targets, AT gave me the struggle survey and didn’t change my progression levels. I’m pretty new to outside workouts, but I don’t know what exactly flagged the workout as a struggle. Here’s what support said when I asked them:

You are right in saying that it’s a known issue that the outside ride pass/fail classifications are unreasonably strict.

We are working on this as we speak. I realise this is a little frustrating for you, so I appreciate your patience as we get this fixed.

I’m still using AT because I don’t do everything outside. Jonathan had said they target a 0.3-0.7 level progression in the plans now, so I’ll pick a level 5-ish workout for my Threshold session next week and hope AT chills out a bit

[cyclhist]

Just as an aside. The outside version of Joaquin +5 is missing the final interval.

[mcneese.chad]

Send that to support@trainerroad.com so they can address it.

[BCrossen]

It is not intended behavior and is a known bug that the workouts are being classified as struggles or fails for outside workouts. I posed the same question to Ivy early this week, and here was her response.

Adaptive Training Closed Beta Update

Good question, it’s not intended behavior but on our radar as a known Adaptive Training issue: ‘Occasionally outside workout outcomes don’t get correctly classified’. Actively working on a fix, you can see all the known and resolved issues in the OP here: Introducing Adaptive Training!

For the time being, you can click the three dots to on the workout page (you can see them to the right in the middle in your screenshot) and click to update the survey response. There should be an option at the bottom for “I did not struggle” or similar. Click that and it will serve you the normal success survey so you can appropriately rate it.