Intro / training / overall TR experience

Hello all. I am a new TR member and will be using this platform primarily for coaching/training with emphasis on mountain bike marathon nationals which will be held here in my town of Roanoke, VA 2025 and 2026. I have years of athletic experience and was a track athlete in college, but am well beyond those years and celebrating 40 soon enough. I have been steadily cycling for about 4 years, with the last 2 years more heavily involved in racing anything between 1-2 hour XC races, up to 100 mile MTB marathon and gravel events. Without much structured cycling training to speak of, my normal week of riding when I want (especially in the summers) is 10+ hours and 100-200 miles a week. Last year I followed a generic Garmin plan, but was only able to use heart rate for 75% or so of the training. This year I have an indoor trainer, power meters on all my bikes and am optimistic about training with power vs hear rate. I have set up an adaptive training plan with the A race being MTB nationals in July. I will be doing a handful of 1-2 hour XC races leading up and a 100K mtb race in May. Looking at the plan TR has set up for me, my concern is that training looks a little on the lighter side to what I’ve been used to on a normal week of cycling, and also compared to what practices during college athletics looked like (I felt like I lived in the athletic building back in those days). I have preferences set to 5 workouts a week with 2 days off and the max it will allow me, of 3 hard days. It initially set all my interval days at 1 hour, 1 easy ride or “recovery” day at an hour or less, and then one endurance day between 1-2 hours. I have manipulated these a bit to up the interval days to 1:15, easy rides to 2 hours and endurance days to 3 hours. I’m staring my 3rd week of this plan and I feel like I still have plenty energy to put into training. My biggest goal is to raise my FTP (currently at 214) and be able to sustain longer durations at that level. I’m a little reluctant right now to see how I could be gaining good fitness, when my riding time is almost half of what I’m used to. I completely understand TR promotes recovery, and I’m fully on board for that. Is there more/less of a benefit I might see by either extending the duration of each workout. Lets say moving 1-2 hard days from 1:15 closer to 2 hours? Or keeping all as is, but then adding in some general riding for fun when I still feel good?

I do like TR so far, as the workouts seem to be more specific to MTB and the races I’m doing, compared to some generic training I was doing with my Garmin. I do not love that there isnt a super quick and easy way to push all workouts to my GPS computer. I’ve been so used to just turning my garmin on while already on the bike ready to go and hitting “ride” on a workout thats already loaded. I fiddled with trying to get a TR workout onto my computer this past sat for about an hour, only to then find out I had to just select a different workout entirely to get it to work. Then it seems incredibly time consuming if I’m trying to load several workouts in advance.

My appreciation in advance for any feedback/advice from someone who was in a similar situation as me, with not being overly confident in the benefit of the plan they were given, and has gone through a season with positive results.

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I’d argue that TR is too specialized and there are fundamentals most cyclists, regardless of discipline, can benefit from working on. Of course you want to do some event specific training but that’s really a later thing following base and build type work

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I would keep your hours similar to what you have been doing. You can adjust your time availability when setting up your plan. Change the default to two hours and it should make the adjustments.

For a long time all the complaints with TR were that the plans were too intense and they were burning people out. As such, TR came up with Adaptive Training and Red Light Green Light to help keep people from burning out. The default approach, especially with new users with limited power data, is a very very conservative approach from the AI.

As said above, keep doing your normal volume – adjust your available time in plan builder, manually change to longer workouts. As you compile more data in the TR ecosystem the AI will learn more about you and become less conservative.

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And now how aggressive a training plan you want.