Hi Chad, I agree with your assessment of Mary Austin. That, Leconte and Avalanche Spire+1 are some of my least favorites. As I look at your performance on Mary Austin, I did notice that on the 4th interval, there is a dip in your heart rate, which I assume corresponds with a “pause” where you likely caught your breath. I assume that since this was categorized as a stretch effort, the need for a brief recovery wasn’t a surprise. Question I have is how you accounted for this brief pause in your end of ride survey? Sounds like the ML registers this pause irrespective of how you rate the difficulty in your survey so perhaps you don’t need to account for it in your rating in order for it to be applied by TR when prescribing your future workouts?
Well - investors generally want the company to be long-term successful. That means the company has to provide a service customers want. Sometimes companies / investors get strategies wrong, but in general, investors have zero interest in running a good business into the ground.
A company like TR would bring in outside investors for one of only three reasons: 1) access to cash for major projects that the company doesn’t have cash on hand for (or couldn’t get a loan at a good rate) and the project can’t wait, 2) access to expertise in an area that company doesn’t have and wants to give equity instead of cash, or 3) liquidity event for early founders.
TR probably isn’t in any of those situations right now. It’s pretty damn clear that the modest price increase a while back was very smartly invested…
Also - congrats Amber! AT is awesome, but Amber’s announcement was the best part of the podcast.
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Good eye. That ‘dip’ was a result me me dropping the chain to the BB during a large to small ring shift after a standing effort. It happens on occasion and forces me off the bike to manually reset the chain to the small ring.
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So it wasn’t a scheduled or even necessary break for recovery. I was in full control and and felt solid in that set.
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The reset took maybe 30 seconds and I was back on the bike. Once up, I used the scroll button to reset the timer back before the chain drop, so I would get the full workout time.
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The dip looks sudden since I jumped back that 30-45 seconds and overwrote the loss of power and the pause.
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As to how TR saw the pause and reset, it got to the end and gave me the normal ‘Pass’ survey. I checked with Amber, and she said that was exactly as expected. Apparently there is some magic logic that is looking at the whole picture and ‘knew’ I wasn’t pausing to recover. Hence, the reason I got the pass and not the fail survey.
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I gave a 4 for my survey, since I nailed the workout with no recovery pauses (the reset actually hurt me more than if I had not dropped the chain and had to restart the trainer up to full speed in ERG), but it took some solid focus and effort. The 4 made sense to me because I was working hard to the final minute, but never used any cheats or adjustments, and wasn’t in a full tunnel of black like some other crushing workouts.
You can see my full workout notes if you’re interested.
Does that make sense?
Thanks Chad. Really helpful feedback - appreciate your sharing your thought process with regard to how you arrived at your survey rating.
Too bad about the chain. Never a great feeling when you’re in the zone and feeling good about your performance. I can see why the adaptive system gave you a pass, as from my experience, if I begin failing midway through a workout, it’s highly unlikely that I wouldn’t also fail in the later intervals. You on the other hand nailed the remaining intervals, which I imagine was registered as a positive pattern by the adaptive learning system.
On longer workouts I often cut down the recovery periods to save time. I.e. if have say 10 mins between intervals I would pause workout and fast forward a few minutes to save time (feature request - would love a 'skip to next interval button!)
Wonder how AT would categorise this…I’m going less time overall but also having less breaks?
This is incredible. Massive well done to all involved- can’t wait to get started.
Wonder if this means that TR will finally be able to pull my weight from GC automatically?
This really is my first-world pet hate: tapping “+” 120 times at the end of nearly every workout in order to raise power up to 220% for ~15 minutes during my extended cool-down, and then tapping “-” 120 times to return it back to cool-down power level for the last few minutes. 
It’s like a recipe for RSI…
Come on, TR, throw us a bone on this one - an easy win - please!
Holders a of a companies stock all have different objectives and investment time horizons - ranging from seconds to (rarely) decades. Therein lies the problem, as many may have quite short time horizons, including often management themselves due to the manner in they’re incentivized, and that skews the decision and goals of the business into prioritising the shorter over the longer term, compromising and ultimately sacrificing stewardship. You see this occur all the time, and it’s a very difficult challenge for public companies to overcome.
a little bit offtopic for runners:
think AT combined with Suggested Workouts of Garmin (only Running Workouts are good for me, Cycling workouts are lame)or soon Stryd is releasing something similar, but you have to pay a little bit, they will deliver automated trainings, guidance and so!
All quite true; the agency problem is a well-known issue in corporate finance.
Although in my post above I was specifically talking about a private firm (start-up) and when it would consider outside investment, and what those outside investors would want for the firm.
The coolest thing about TrainerRoad, and it comes across very much in the podcasts, is that everyone is clearly working hard, but they clearly enjoy the work; I’m sure they have disagreements on things, but they’re all working towards a clear, concise goal. It’s amazing to see. Makes me wish I was working there 
When you have that, great things happen.
Due to time constraints of training during baby nap time I often skip the warm down, or even do only some of the tempo work on the end of workouts such as Baird +6. If I’ve done the majority of the TSS prescribed, and certainly all of the intervals at the intended intensity, will I have ‘completed’ the work out for the purposes of progression?
None of this would have happened without the early adopters (I joined in May 2015, so I think I was a couple of years late to the party). My main gripe is why weren’t you around 20 years ago @Nate_Pearson - I could have been so fast.
how many folk will be in the beta testing? i signed up on thursday eve, unsure of the wait ahead?
@mcneese.chad - what format does the “other” option on Fail and Short take? Is there another series of pre-set options available if you select Other? Or is there space for users to enter their own notes/comments and to expand on precisely what other factors led to the fail or the cutting short of the workout? Or do users just select Other with no other input that expands on what the other factors were?
I think the post ride notes will take account of need to finish a workout early etc.
This is very exciting - first public step on a long journey. Something we’ve been talking about on this forum for a long time. I am anxiously awaiting access to the beta, although I only signed up yesterday, so I’m hoping it isn’t a first come first serve beta and is more random or based on workouts completed in TR, or length of subscription 
A few questions - my apologies if these were answered up thread somewhere, but I did skim most of the thread and didn’t see them addressed by the TrainerRoad team (I easily could’ve missed them as we’re approaching 900 posts)
I understand the updating of workouts up or down based on capabilities and prior performances will work with both custom plans and standard plans - this is awesome. Depending on the answers to these questions I can rather easily continue building my own plans as a starting point and then lean back and let ML take the wheel
How will things work when it comes to changing rest schedules and frequency of intense workouts?
I assume this is either an upcoming feature or part of the release, but if I want to start with a standard TR plan, but consistently report fatigue on a 3:1 ratio will the current planned release make my workouts easier, or will it begin to insert entire rest weeks sooner than planned?
Similarly, if I were to opt out of a given workout and only do two hard days a week will the system begin to modify the upcoming weeks to only include two hard days each week?
Handing everything over the the ML will take some trust and time - but historically I have consistently burned myself out doing three days of intensity each week, but am too stubborn to not complete the work assigned. So I’m interested in what it will look like both at the initial release and what the development goals would be in this area.
Again my apologies if this has already been addressed upthread and I missed it.
Question for the developers: up to now, the advice was to maintain the same FTP assessment protocol for the whole season. Would adaptive training be capable to cope with a change in FTP assessment protocol? I have used the ramp test up to now, but I feel the 20min test is more representative for the races I’m going to have next summer (very long granfondos) and I would like to give it a try
Thanks!
As a Masters rider and former racer now doing triathlon I can’t wait to get added to this great development. Love TR. The best training app and always so responsive. Very excited!