Impact of long weekend rides on AI generated plans

TrainerRoad Software
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I have an 400mile+ endurance event at the end of this summer. After starting to use TR last week, the plan that was generated (the base phase was intentionally omitted) looked reasonable with the exception of weekend outdoor rides which don’t have sufficient miles or hours. (I’ve manually adjusted the next couple of weekend rides). I have been riding 175-250 miles split across Saturdays and Sundays most weekends since the beginning of the year and will be increasing that gradually over the next 6 weeks.

The question is, given the harder weekend days, will the AI attempt to adjust the plan to compensate by reducing the workload during the week (I’d prefer it didn’t)? Or will it figure out that the longer rides are to augment the midweek rides. Do I simply skip any suggested augmentation?
I’ll have some real experience with this over the next couple of week.

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What the AI does will be dependent on how it feels you are handling the training load. My experience is that, in general, TR will give you shorter training sessions with higher intensity, instead of longer training sessions with lower intensity, to (theoretically, at least) accomplish the same end goal.

Personally, I’ve been wondering the same thing since I started with TR back in February, and I’m guessing I’ll find out next weekend when I go to my A event, which I am anticipating to be between 5.5 and 6 hours, but haven’t had any training sessions longer than 3 hours.

Another thing you might try (as TR probably hasn’t done this, since it seems to cater to the ‘time constrained’ cyclist, is to modify your training plan to let the app know that you have time to do long rides on weekends. It may not give you rides that fill the entire time you specify (at least at the start), but it will work you up toward filling that time, provided it feels you’re handling that volume well. The steps to update your plan can be found here:

https://support.trainerroad.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038029531-How-to-Change-your-Training-Plan-Volume

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Honestly, 200m split between Saturday and Sunday is likely ample volume for your weekly “long ride” in preparation for this. Not sure how much more I would increase that. I’m doing a 400m in a few weeks. My longest ride between now and then will be 100-130km - I prefer to just keep the weekly volume up in preparation for multi-day events.

If you haven’t done many rides of similar duration to your target event then you should do a couple of test/shakeout rides in the 200-300km range to sort out things like nutrition and fit.

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Thanks! This makes sense. The midweek volume and intensity in the 2 weeks I’ve had w/ TR so far is in line with where I was training so I’ll bump up the volume on the weekends and see what the impact is.

Good luck in your A event!

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Thanks for the input… I’ve ridden several 400 mile events (all pre covid) and a 200 mile race about 2 months ago and feel that the weekly training plan from TR plus training at 200 max on the weekends as you suggest (plus a shakeout ride or two ) could be plenty…

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I’m not an expert, but I trained for the unbound 200 this year using TR along with some longer rides outside. It seems TR is best at prescribing hard intervals which can aid in increasing your FTP. The idea being if you have a bigger engine, you can do longer endurance events at a higher Z2 number.
I was surprised when I first used plan builder you couldn’t even put in the distance for your rides. It doesn’t seem to take really long races into account very well.
One thing I particularly don’t like about TR is that it suggests 3 hard intervals days. I tried that for a while and got burnt out pretty quickly. I think there’s decent amount of literature that 3 days of intensity is generally too much to recover from unless your a special kind of athlete or young enough to recover really quickly. It didn’t work for me and I lost gains. Oh, wait… Just realized I am rambling :rofl:

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You know that you can set the plan builder to develop your plan with 2 hard workouts per week? Its the Masters plan.

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Yes, I do know that. I was on masters plan, and now am back after experimenting with 3 hard intervals.

I was referring to my experience where when first creating the plan TR “recommends” 3 hard days.

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One thing you might have to overcome is Red Light/Green Light adapting your plan. It seems to often change my Tuesday workout to an easier endurance workout if I ride long at the weekend, which them means I end up with only one intensity session a week if I follow the advice. I’d much prefer it if it swapped the days around, make Tuesday easy but move Tuesday’s workout to Wednesday when it shows I’m fresh.

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the plan i used for the amstel gold race 150km had no ride longer than 1h30 in the original TR plan. I manually did 3 longer rides on sunday, but kept to the plan mostly. Lo and behold, i didn’t really need it. As long as you fuel alright the intensity of the TR plan worked for my goal.

However I think even TR themselves say you can do a longer ride instead of the planned endurance ride especially the standard sunday ride

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I’ve been doing a masters plan for a stage race in August and doing 100 miles once per week for 7 weeks now (not on recovery weeks) and it (the ai recommendations) seems perfectly fine. I put it in as a 5 hour outdoor solo ride (the max) and the ride takes as long as they take. I think it works.

Joe

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Only one lap of the track. I wouldn’t worry about long rides.

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:joy: I’m planning to ride a tank though that’s bicycle powered. And the course is basically pure mud. So I’ll be happy with a sub-30h finishing time for those 400m.

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Hey @geepple,

Welcome to the forum! :partying_face:

This is a good question, and the answer depends on a handful of things.

TrainerRoad’s fatigue management system will suggest adaptations to your plan if the work you’re doing does not seem sustainable long-term based on your recent training history.

Our data shows that athletes who ramp up their training stress too quickly often suffer from overtraining symptoms and need to adjust their training plans in order to recover and move forward with productive training.

Since you’re often doing 6-7+ hour long rides on the weekend in addition to a couple of hard workouts during the week, it’s likely that TR will suggest adjusting your plan after those long rides, as you’ve seen over the past few weeks. This can compound if you continue to ride through days of high fatigue.

A good example is your 7+ hour long ride on June 1st. You got a red day on Sunday, but chose to ride another 4.5 hours instead of resting, which caused two more red days on Monday and Tuesday. A similar thing happened this past weekend, but because your Saturday ride wasn’t as long, you only had red days through Monday.

If you want to have the best chance of long-term success with your training, it’s probably ideal to follow TR’s recommendations.

If you’re confident in your approach, though, feel free to make your own call. As your weekly training stress starts to stabilize (it’s been a bit up and down over the past year) it is possible that you’ll get fewer red days if your training is going well. Additionally, if those suggestions are getting in your way, you could switch your training approach from “Demanding” to “Aggressive.” This will tell the software that you’re less concerned about recovery, and are willing to risk overtraining in order to achieve more training stimulus.

I do personally think that your weekend rides are way longer than they need to be in order to build the aerobic system to complete a long ride like the one you’re planning. :sweat_smile:

Let me know if this helps and if you have any other questions about any of this.

Good luck & happy riding!

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Thanks Eddie… This helps understand the app a bit better and has some good recommendations for modification… A couple of thoughts:

  1. I hesitate to go ‘Aggressive’ as that would remove the warnings re: the risk of overtraining that I clearly need
  2. I’ve been using the long weekend rides for years but with less mid week work… I’m willing to back down but not sure where to back down to? One long ride (e.g.. a century) per weekend followed by a light day? I rode a 200 mile race a couple of months back and had no issues (I just need to do it 2 days in a row at the end of August :-))
  3. I do like having a more intensity during the week and would trade off weekend miles to get that.

I’m thinking of

  1. riding 5 days a week
  2. One long ride on the weekend followed by an active recovery ride (probably indoors)
  3. Monday’s and Friday’s off
  4. Something like the 1:30 / 00:30 / 2:00 rides mid week (like last week).
    LMK what you think and I’ll adjust my plan over the next couple of days.

Thanks!

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