BLUF: Why is TR allowing my PLs to decay away, most concerningly during my upcoming Build phase, when I have been sticking to its plan to a “T”, haven’t been failing workouts, or even over-surveying the workout difficulties?
I’m a bit confused/concerned about something and was hoping someone might be able to offer an explanation. I understand this is a terribly long post, but I wanted to be comprehensive with the background info so that anybody interested would have a decent grasp on my concern. Here’s that background:
- I onboarded with TR October 30th and spent the next two days getting all the administrivia set up.
- I have an extensive racing history, have done structured training (coached and non-coached) on-and-off for forever, and had well over a decade of training and racing history that TR seemed to import comprehensively, including over 15 years of power data (I’ve been training & racing with power since I purchased my first SRM in 2008).
- I am not time-constrained, respond positively to higher volume, recover quickly, and have a high tolerance for a robust training workload.
- My race season starts mid-March with my first C-priority race, and my first A-priority race (a 4-day stage race) is at the beginning of May. I entered my full 2026 season’s race calendar, including prioritizing all the events and entering appropriate durations and effort levels for each, as part of the TR training plan generation/setup process.
- I had TR generate a “Climbing Road Race” focused plan, Masters High Volume, six days per week, Aggressive training approach. Although I don’t need the additional recovery the Masters plans provide, I chose a Masters plan because I prefer to swap the normal third day of intervals that would be part of the normal 6-day plan for a second day of longer-duration endurance work, as that better supports the type of racing I do and my physiological traits, strengths, and weaknesses. My plan started with Base 1 on November 1.
So here’s the deal…initially it seemed like TR was kind-of feeling out my Progression Levels by pretty quickly ramping up Sweet Spot and Threshold workouts. That went well, seemed to align with the Base phase and my input objective of improving my (extended-length) climbing, and the system seemed to pretty quickly get a pretty good and accurate fix on where my levels were. But then, oddly, over the course of the rest of the Base phase of my plan TR seemed to kind-of gradually ramp down my workout PLs and let them decay away, specifically the Endurance, Sweet Spot, and Threshold levels, which are all key to Base phase endurance development and my stated goal of climbing improvement (it’s my understanding that decay kicks in if a “Productive” workout hasn’t been completed in ~4 weeks?) The endurance PL was allowed to decay so much (due mostly because all my key longer duration training sessions are done on my two “solo ride” days outdoors, where TR doesn’t pick up PLs) that I purposely manually overrode one of the final long endurance indoor rides of Base 3 and substituted the very highest level Alternate workout TR offered to me – a Breakout workout – which wasn’t challenging to complete and did successfully bump my Endurance PL way back up.
I have now completed my full 11-week Base 1/2/3 mesocycle and am getting ready to kick off the Build phase tomorrow, on the 12th week of my plan. The problem is, looking forward to what TR has scheduled for me this whole PL decay thing is going to continue. In fact, through the entirety of my upcoming 8 weeks of scheduled “build” there are only three workouts, near the very end of the phase, that finally push me only very slightly above where the system had my Threshold PL in min-December (and I remind you that I’m doing 6 workouts per week). Literally all six of the rest of my PLs are going to be allowed to decay to a lower level than they’re currently sitting now at the end of my Base training…which to repeat are actually all (except for Endurance, because of the manual workout override I mentioned above) already lower than when I started my Base training because TR allowed them to decay during those 11 weeks of Base training.
A few additional notes:
- Over the course of my 11 week Base training I only missed one scheduled workout, and it was a pretty insignificant and short 1 hour low endurance ride.
- I failed only one workout, early-on in the program when the system appeared to be feeling out my levels.
- I have completed every single other workout, and completed them all on point and exactly as prescribed.
- I have gotten two yellow light days and one red, and all three fell on my scheduled Monday day off from training, so they all occurred exactly where you’d expect (and even want) them. I respected all three, and they incurred no plan impact since they fell on scheduled days off anyway.
- I completed surveys for every single session, including my outdoor rides, and the only times I rated them higher than it seemed TR expected was on a couple of my longer-duration “Ride Solo” days where my perceived effort was “Hard” simply because of the duration of the ride and/or wind. And in my estimation even those ratings were only a single step above what TR might’ve expected for a 4-5 hour endurance level ride, and they were before scheduled days off (and are what prompted the few yellow/red days I mentioned above).
- I have accepted nearly (but not) all of TR’s suggested adaptations. The only ones, in fact, that I haven’t accepted have been a handful where the system seemed to confusingly want to lower the difficulty of scheduled key workout or, in a couple cases, increase the difficulty of a recovery day. In those few cases I would’ve exacerbated the PL decay issue had I accepted the adaptations. In those handful of instances the suggested adaptations were pretty minor, anyway, and I stuck with the workouts TR had initially prescribed for me…I didn’t stray off and do something whacky or out-of-line or anything like that.
- I had one AI FTP change detection after Base 1 and accepted it. I understand that at that time, since my FTP was reset at a (slightly) higher level, that there was a corresponding slight reduction to my PLs. I understand how that works and why it’s done, and it’s not what I’m referencing when speaking about my PLs decaying.
- I understand that I can manually override scheduled workouts and select ones with higher PL ratings that will protect against PL decay, and even work to increase my PLs. But I believe the system’s supposed to be “smart enough” to do this on its own, and don’t imagine that we’re expected to pay for a system that needs to be manually overridden constantly and hand held by the users to get to work correctly.
So my question is: why is TR allowing my PLs to decay, and specifically why is it planning to allow them to further decay during my Build phase, THE phase during which they should actually be being pushed up?
Thanks to anyone that has had the patience and attention span to read all of this!