Sunday Zwift race in the first screenshot → result yellow day
Sunday endurance ride in the second screenshot → result red day
It just doesn’t align at all with how I actually felt after these days.
The only time I actually felt that a red day aligned with how I felt was the red day on last Saturday. I really wasted myself on Friday, so I did a super easy ride on Saturday just to spin the legs a bit. And then next day I felt pretty good again.
I scrolled my calendar to the past to see where the red days happened last year:
after doing 25 x zwift volcano circuit
after helf-everesting
after everesting
after first 5-hour outdoor ride in the early spring
after a normal road race
after 12 hour race
after 24 hour race
etc
These were all pretty solid efforts. It’s a far cry from how normal endurance rides now tend to trigger red days.
Today again is a red day. I don’t know why. I feel completely fresh. The only reason that I’m not going out for a long ride today is to save my legs for the hard intervals tomorrow. Perhaps the red days are now also accounting for that?
The other reason I can attribute this to is that I’ve been gradually increasing my volume. But it’s really nothing different compared to past years. Technically my volume is up compared to last year, but that’s largely because I did a 10-day training camp. Besides that it’s really pretty much the same.
That’s it right there. TR’s RLGL is very similar to looking at ramp rate of CTL, AKA a fitness and freshness chart. So similar to looking at the past seven day’s TSS vs the last 6 weeks avg. By both ramping up general volume and having a big loading week, you’re carrying recent fatigue.
You body might handle that fine in the short term, or after it’s adjusted to higher volume. But you have to build up to it or this is what you’ll see.
One possible variable is that in this training camp that I did, I did not have a power meter. If I would have had one, I’m pretty sure TrainerRoad would have pretty much labeled all these 10 days as red (or nearly all). I have no idea how it interpreted these ten days. Perhaps it concluded that I spent these 10 days lying on the sofa, although I did like 3x my average weekly volume. I marked the whole thing in my calendar as a stage race, but I think this probably didn’t have any effect whatsoever.
If TrainerRoad completely ignores these 10 days, then from his perspective it’s like I eased off a bit, then took 10 days off, and then rode a week easy. So my fitness must have decresed as a result.
Hmm… I think that’s just what it thought, because right after this block it decided to lower my FTP. But that’s just one possible interpretation. Perhaps it actually thought the opposite: I had been overdoing it and therefore my fitness went down? I suspect the former, but I guess there’s no way of really knowing.
There is a TSS Estimation feature for rides without power data - it’s in the account settings. If you haven’t done it already, I would turn it on, and let it do calculations for previous rides. Just need your max HR while cycling.
Oh, cool. Thanks for the tip. I turned the TSS Estimation on. Perhaps it’ll change things. I guess I’ll have to wait a while before it takes effect on all my past rides.
My training camp days now all show up in bright burning red
And after that there’s now only a single red day in my calendar. Which came after the first long early-spring ride (preceded by a day with some hard intervals), perfectly aligning with my pattern from the last year.
