Yesterday I did Mont Gosford +1 which includes low cadence drills in all efforts through out the workout. Without these drills I would have rated the workout as moderate. However, the low cadence drills cooked my muscles to the point where I had to make a short pause in the last interval to get through.
As far as I understand the AI models see the watt ouput of the workout but it will not be able to derive that it was the low cadence drills that challenged me. I am at a loss on how I should rate the workout under these circumstances, any advice?
Interested to hear TR’s take on this, I hadn’t considered it before.
I actually have the in-workout chatter turned off so I never really think about drills etc but I regularly change up my cadence to test my muscular endurance vs aerobic endurance when I feel the desire to (for endurance+/Z2 rides I have my favorite playlist on shuffle and try to match the tempo of the songs all the way through which gives me an interesting challenge…never know what tempo is going to align with which wattage!) but because I’m doing it myself I can manage muscular fatigue if I feel like I’m going to be too cooked.
I guess that would be my first thought; abandon the drill if you feel it’s going to pull you away from the goal of the ride. I think there is a disclaimer about this; that you should ignore the drills if they diverge from your goals.
I always figured the drills were part of the workout, so omitting them would mean compromising the workout. Most drills tend to make the workout harder, which I thought was part of the plan. I have no idea how AI treats this.
Drills are always optional. AI pays no attention to your adherence to them. I haven’t done a drill in many many months.
TR may not do the disclaimer in all workouts but there is usually a sentence to this effect in the instructions. Something like “feel free to skip the drills if they do not align with your goals” or some such thing.
Sure, drills are optional and I only do them on occasion. In this instance, I only got into trouble at the very end of the work out, midway through the last interval. At that point there were not much room to adapt as going from a low cadence to a higher one is demanding when your muscular strenght is already fatigued. Naturally, I will keep this in mind for future workouts.
When you say rate the work I completed, do you mean the actuall RPE including the drills or how the watts would feel under self selected circumstances?
To expand on Helvellyn and Kona and to further clarify… the rating is not only meant to tell the AI what you were capable of but also the current state of your body. It is adjusting for your changing abilities but also adjusting for fatigue. If you don’t tell it you’re fatigued then your next workout may start drilling you down into a hole.
There is another thread active right now about how to rate endurance rides easy vs moderate and a bunch of us have been discussing this. As you would read in that thread sometimes Z2 workouts are easy and sometimes hard depending on all kinds of things including life circumstances and fatigue from job, life, etc. It is not about what you COULD have done, it is about what you DID do. Tell the AI the truth of what actually occurred rather than what might have been and your workouts will be much more productive over time and won’t dig you into a hole.
