I wanted to share an update on my experience because I feel like I’m one of the few who is having a pretty good time with things in the AT beta and have been impressed with its workout selections for me, particularly in the past month.
In the past month, I’ve really put AT through the ringer. I’ve skipped workouts to do group rides (many of which I would have never been able to hang with before TR). I took a vacation and used the annotation feature to delay my plan. I injured myself on vacation and took 5ish days off the bike. I added an A race because Intelligentsia Cup announced dates and races, so it recalculated my plan (this returned a couple weird weeks, but that’s a Plan Builder thing not AT). Despite all this variability and instability, the workouts still feel like they’re bang on for what I need for the zone AT is targeting. And it’s not even fully crediting all my rides yet! I don’t see failure here so much as potential because I’m already getting great workouts, they simply aren’t outstanding. And I’m totally fine with that in a beta.
For example, several weeks ago in my final loading week for a block of work, I was doing Anaerobic 7.6 workouts at a Stretch level (had to cut short due to work and time). Shortly after that, I had a vacation where I tweaked my back so I was off the bike for about a week. Since then I’ve not done any workouts with a similar Anaerobic profile, and predominantly I had been in a short block building up my VO2 after recalculating my plan. This lead my PL for Anaerobic to drop down to 5.7 over four weeks, and today, I was served a 5.8 workout labeled Productive. It was chef’s kiss perfect.
For me, there have been numerous times where I’ve gotten this chef’s kiss perfect workout using AT, despite the variables and it not understanding all the stuff I’m doing. I’m quite impressed with that and it’s why I’ve been such an advocate of putting some trust in the thing because it somehow works around those things and gives me a good plan anyway. It’s made me realize that sweating all those small things maybe doesn’t matter as much as I think. Even sub-optimally where it isn’t counting my recent hard group rides nor is it counting my outdoor workouts, it still manages to somehow serve me the right thing for the zone it’s progressing me through. It feels like magic at times, honestly.
I wanted to share that because there often are more problems being posted here than there are successes. And that totally makes sense. It is a beta and the experience will not be optimal for everyone and the feedback is invaluable for the team. However, I think we could use a few success stories too, so this has been mine. While AT isn’t perfect right now, perfection doesn’t matter that much in the grand scheme.