And what was the event qualified as (A, B or C race)? After my A event I got a message from join congratulating me and telling me to take a short time off but not too long
It was a B race as a tune up for Big Sugar in 4 weeks.
It turned into a survival event, there were several stretches of double track that required hike a bike for a bit, of 50+ starters only 11 of us finished, I came home in 7th. I was not impressed with JOIN compared to TR but hard to say if it was just life being busy or the training that made the difference
1 Like
More JOIN quackery.
In the last week of my plan before a 6 day MTB stage race.
The ‘Taper’ week is identical if not more than the week before.
As an example:
If I adjust the time down for any week:
“You are going to lose fitness”.
There really is a reason this was like £25 for 6 months.
Did you sort the 280 watt issue ?
Nope. They basically said: sorry, we recognise this is a problem, we can only suggest you fit a larger front ring and this isn’t a problem for most of our riders for whom 280-300w is a satisfactory level of resistance
So why are you still using it ? You don’t like it, it doesn’t work for you, and hardware wise you have issues, if I was having all the issues that you are having and know what i want, I’d self coach with Trainer Day if cost was a issue
5 Likes
I posted this in July
1 Like
I’m really flummoxed as to why somebody would invest the time and effort to train for 6 day stage race, and then use the wrong tool (for them) to train with, for months !!!, this is a hobby it’s supposed to be fun and enjoyable, Just the mental energy lost from all these posts is going to be detrimental to training
I was having probably the best year of my life for fitness and then it fell apart in July with Covid and then broken bones, I am truly excited for next year, looking forward to getting back to training over the winter, I can’t imagine thinking, that worked really well for me, I’ll use Humano instead this winter
Edit
Nothing against Humngo, it works for a lot of people, just didn’t suit me, so I stopped using it
1 Like
Yeah, same. I hope Neuromancer doesn’t see these as insults but rather experience sharing from people who’ve wasted time and energy using the wrong tool/system. There are things I do and don’t like about Join but it’s too cheap to feel like I HAVE to stick with it if it’s not working for me. I’m currently following a slightly modified FasCat SS plan that I bought years ago because I feel like I need to focus on pushing out my TTE and Join wasn’t the right tool for that. I’m about to take a month long holiday and just focus on riding/running/hiking for fun. I’ll then either go back to SS work or do LSRF depending on what I want to focus on at the end of the month.
1 Like
Absolutely, I hope I offered Neuromancer no offense, can be hard to see when you are close to something and sometimes you need somebody to point out that the fix is simple
2 Likes
It’s ok, I had a similar experience with XERT. I fought the owners for ages trying to get them to recognise the obvious problems that were crippling the system.
I don’t think you can draw longitudinal conclusions about a training methodology from a month (or even two) of using it. I give things six months usually, if only just to give my mind and body something new and a different approach.
But to be frank: I’m here because I’m poor. I left my job to go back to school and I have a mortgage and a kid. Trainerroad is like the price of my monthly gas bill.
I just use it on erg mode, Itrain outside when I can (or I did, until I was run over), and when JOIN suggests dumb shit I just don’t do it and do something else instead.
4 Likes
Join has helped me a lot this season. I joined TR in late 2020 (start of indoor season here). The first year (2021), I saw significant improvements in FTP. In 2022, FTP climbed again. In 2023, I plateaued… but also felt completely exhausted heading into my A race which I missed due to COVID. The plateau combined with the fatigue/exhaustion led me to try something else. Join was offering 90 days free then (I think), so why not? Here are the results:
I should note that I switched to dual-sided power this season and learned that I have a L/R imbalance that varies from 53/47 to 55/45. If I ‘correct’ the 2022 numbers from the left crank PM to account for the power imbalance, my numbers are better across the curve. It’s even more interesting to see how some of those numbers compare:
- 5sec power - 2022 Chasing a local KOM after a brief warm-up (i.e. fresh) vs. 2024 Sprint at the end of a 100 mile road race
- 60sec power - 2022 Chasing a local KOM after a brief warm-up (i.e. fresh) vs. 2024 VO2 interval as part of a 5 hour workout
- 20min power - All out effort both years… but 25-30 watts better this year when corrected from L/R imbalance
- 1/2/4hr power - 2024 were results from Lotoja… a 200-mile ~10 hour effort. All previous results were from much shorter rides… you can go harder when you know you only have to go 3-4 hours.
Race Results:
July Fondo 1 - 2023 6th age group-57/301 overall vs 2024 
age group-25/300 overall
July Fondo 2 - Not timed, but this course has 3 large climbs so less affected by wind/pack than above race. Strava times - 2023 Climb1 45:54 Climb2 40:39 Climb3 34:43 Total 5:31:31 / 2024 Climb1 39:51 Climb2 36:31 Climb3 26:57 Total 5:12:11… and I had a flat tire this year that cost me 5 minutes and my tire was a bit low for the remainder of the ride
Lotoja (I can’t see placing overall in 2022 and raced a different Cat each year, so just time and power info) - 2022 10:52:43 AP 171 NP 197 (L-only power, biased high) vs 2024 9:48:49 AP 183 NP 205
My work schedule is often unpredictable, so Join’s flexibility has been great for me. I also think the CTL progression helped me a lot. This is Jan 2023 through Sep 2024. You can see the consistent ramp up this year.
I have only used the Join workout player once or twice. I do most of my workouts outside, but when inside I’ve used both Garmin and Zwift. The Garmin x40s work pretty well for indoor workouts… the x30s less so. I will sometimes do the workout ‘freestyle’ in Zwift where I have the intervals on my Garmin and ride as though outdoors to hit the targets as opposed to ERG.
It’s possible I will plateau again on Join and look for something else, but the flexible/adaptive nature of the app works great for me.
4 Likes
Preach. Same here. What was even more frustrating was when I’d ask questions in the various social media, the end users would always gang up and tell me that I just didn’t understand because I didn’t study the podcasts explaining it all well enough. Half the reason I left was because their biggest supporters were just insufferable.
2 Likes
A different vision of tapering. Iirc Jim explained in one of the dutch podcasts. For my event on a Saturday join gave me a vo2max workout on Tuesday and an endurance ride on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday off
I had the exact same experience and one of the many reasons I ended up dumping it. Not sure why anyone would get upset at calling out deficiencies in this or any other training app, also good info as far as I am concerned.
1 Like
Nobody was getting upset about anybody calling out deficiences in this or any other training app
The concern that was Necromancer was not doing his own mental health or training any good, with a app that he was not working for him, he’s not being paid to review the app for you and provide information on how good the apps work, he’s paying to get a trainer plan and get faster, and it’s not been working for him for a while
Just rememmber, this is you’re hobby and you should be enjoying it, if you are fighing training plans , software companies, it’s the wrong one for you
Good, a lot of people swap and change, even when works for you, I’m more than guilty off this, I’m probably a bit older than you, but spend 6 months doing the wrong thing (over the winter) set yourself back for the summer, pick up a injury in August (like me) your back to trying to recover over the winter, that’s 18 months lost … you’re time a health is important, like he posted Pbase pointed out in July that this wasn’t going to end well
If cost was a issue I really would look @ TrainerDay (you can have a look for free, just to use the wokout player is $3.99) and I’m really simplified my training
- Ride as much as you can in Z2
- Base = Sweetspot and Threshold
- Build = Threshold and V02
- Speciality = V02 and V02 (or somthing similar)
And then for progression I just have a series of workout where I add 5 mins to time in zone, and then divide up into intervals, it’s worked well for me so far, I think a lot of apps make things a lot more complex than they need to
Then I do something like the TR post workout summery, < Hard Progress, > Hard do the same workout again (or go one down)
Anyway sorry … I went of on a bit of a tangent their,
4 Likes
I think there is also a bit of survivorship bias here. If you train, you’ll usually get faster. It takes a lot of very objective thinking to understand if you were getting faster more quickly or more slowly or stagnating.
Even though by the end of it I wanted to petrol bomb XERT HQ, I learned a decent amount from the time that I never had on Trainerroad.
- Cutting ERG mode out of my training.
- Working at higher % of Z2 to improve aerobic efficiency.
- Just working a lot fucking harder - like, I did a couple of 30/15 sessions on XERT where I thought I was actually going to die at the end.
There is a lot to like about JOIN; some of the training bits I’m going to take away from it are:
- Three day blocks for normal training. This is largely what a lot of pro tour riders do these days.
- High Z2 work on compressed days - I respond to alternating intervals at sort of high z2 when the days are shorter than 2h. My aerobic efficiency has gone through the roof - before my accident I’d nearly broken a reliable NP/hr of 2.0. I would not do this on longer (3h+) days, because the glycogen and fatigue cost is enormous and you then can’t do intervals the next day.
- Low cadence work when I’m too fatigued for vo2.
The problem with this, and with XERT, and a lot of other pieces of software is often the ergonomics of the whole thing rather than it being an utterly useless way to spend your time.
I’ll look at TrainerDay, that looks helpful.
4 Likes
Sheesh, that is quite the dnf rate
1 Like
Sorry for asking but what does the abbreviation LSRF stand for?