Masters athlete here and I think your masters intensity feature has been built? Do a low volume plan and utilize train now with endurance rides if you want to add more hours than that. Between that and AT toning down the VO2 etc your requested masters intensity feature is there. Not saying this is you but I’d wager large amounts that the majority of people who say TR has them doing too much intensity are on mid or high volume plans.
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Low volume has different type workouts. SSBII low volume is vo2 threshold and sweet spot. SSBII mid volume doesn’t do a vo2 workout. It is one threshold and sweet spot.
They are designed differently. Low volume gets me doing vo2 workouts now at pl of 7 and 8, Add in thresholds into the 5s and my legs don’t recover enough for the sweet spot. So I do 2 days of endurance with my vo2 and threshold. If I pick mid volume I just find it is too much sweet spot and I am subbing out for more endurance.
Either way I am adjusting for what AT doesnt do
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I would disagree that the low volume plans, which still call for 3 intensity workouts per week and do nothing to modify the work/recovery week ratios, represent the masters specific plans that we’ve been told were coming for a very long time now. As I mentioned in a previous post, I improved using those plans. However, improving or “getting faster” does not equate to achieving our best. I’ve seen much more improvement with my own workouts and plans limiting the intensity to 2x per week and taking more frequent recovery weeks than through the TR plans. But that isn’t the real issue at hand here. It’s just one small cog in the wheel. The issue is that TR has a history of releasing new features that need improvement before they are truly functional for many users, acknowledging that those improvements are needed, indicating that they are going to make those improvements, then moving on to the next new feature before making the promised improvements to the previous features.
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It is so nice to feel valued with special treatment for being a long term customer for once. I really appreciate it!
And long time users probably don’t take much effort to keep happy with customer service and such.
But how long do you expect it to last? I mean, 50 years from now do you expect to be paying the same amount? And with all of the enhancements that have come along in those 50 years? How realistic is that? (spoiler: it’s not!)
For gods sake end legacy pricing for new subscribers now and see if natural attrition will occur with current legacy users. If it only costs $2/month to carry a legacy user, consider just leaving them be.
There sure are a lot of you bastards paying $99/month. Clearly I’m a bIt jealous!
Joe
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$89. Never missed a payment. More of an investor.
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TR now vs 5 years ago is night and day different, with massive improvements. What the hell are you talking about.
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Hi i’m with trainer road with something like 4-5 years right now. I’m grandfathered at 99$/year. So jump to 15$month will be significant amount increase. But if we want to jump to 20 then i think it will be cheaper for me to pay to some real coach to train me… and try garmin connect with strava for free, or even use TP.
I was always thinking that made a promise to freeze prices for current users is not a smartest idea, but… it was a promise!
So i think good option will be to start increasing price for grandfathered users, but lest say, for the half on increase of what get new user.
For example TR decide to increase price for new users about 3$, then grandfathered users get increase on 1.5$.
And of course, new users shouldn’t be grandfathered from right now!
A lot of people seem to expect legacy subscribers to pay more to support the development of new features.
As a “customer” I pay for s service as it stands today, not for a service that is promised in the future that may never happen.
People have also said it’s a business. It is.
So a lot of businesses take on debt or outside investment which they then use to develop the product in the hope that they can reach new customers with the additional features.
I don’t know what trainerroad do but I don’t believe they take much debt (if any) or outside investment.
When you reach a certain size there comes a crunch point. For me TR are at that point. If they want to move the platform on, at the scale they want, raising the price for legacy customers isn’t probably going to do enough. They probably need to take some debt or investment.
Look at Zwift, raised millions and they are still struggling to develop the platform… But they aren’t raising prices all the time.
There are a lot of things that have been said would be coming and haven’t. This is due to a lack of resources to accomplish these things and I think TR have developed an amazing product for a purely subscription based business model. But I’m not suddenly going to want to pay more for a “roadmap” that may never materialise.
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I think this is a software industry problem in general. The new and shiny always takes precedence and no time is given to go back to the fix the issues. Apple developers complain they reported bugs to Apple years ago that have not been fixed.
I imagine Zwift users have a long list of issues they want fixed as well, but new features are added instead.
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Simple response from me, I grandfathered thus supported the startup to be what it is today. Don’t create double standards and alienate the clients who supported you when things were though. I want product growth. If you want to create different products offer that to the new and standard clients.
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I’d look at what was available if and when there was any change to my subscription then make a decision. I wouldn’t cut my nose off despite my face.
Yep - I’m turning 50 this year (not sure what the cut-off age is for ‘Masters’), and my Sprint Tri plan is very heavy on VO2Max (which I can do) and Threshold (which I find really bloody hard!). I’m just about holding on to the end of my current Speciality phase.
Even then I have had to switch things around - for some reason AT keeps putting the hardest Threshold workout at the end of the week when I’m toast! Additionally, it wants to try and bump me up by 0.5 of a level in that workout, when I’m just about able to eke out a 0.1 increase.
I don’t mind the intensity, but more recovery time would be good.
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I think it would have been worse to unilaterally implement price structure changes for legacy users without floating it first or giving rationale.
If you’d frozen legacy user features and asked them to pay an extra $5 for new features without explanation, that would have alienated a lot of users I would suggest (not saying that’s what you should/will do necessarily).
Certainly I don’t feel betrayed 
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He didn’t say that TR hasn’t been developed or changed in the last 5 years, I think what he is driving at is
- Calendar, great for TR, but doesn’t show other workout types imported, so your TSS may not “line up”
- Data analytics, doesn’t compare to TP / intervals in functionality, and see 1
- Plan builder, isn’t really a plan builder, it stick existing plans on a calendar, it doesn’t really allow you to build a plan specific to you
- Polarized plans … well
- Master plans, promised … but now told AT does it for you (it doesn’t)
Not really thought about this, just what jumped to mind
not really the same
- Outdoor workouts AT, promised soon Feburary 2021
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Incorporating run and swim workouts. That thread was started in 2018. As others have said, at and train now don’t know what to suggest properly if it isn’t getting fed proper data.
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Exactly, Alan couzens can write a model that can do this by himself and he’s not a programmer, just a researcher who learned to code. So at gets rolled out and the logic is basically a yes no to increase the pl or drop the pl. I can do that on my own.
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Masters (45) HV plans user here. AT does improve upon this in my experience. SSBHV 1 & 2 went much better this year with AT than last, even though last year I made my own 3/1 work/rest alternative HV plan. When I struggled during week 4 of SSBHV2, AT got me back on track and I ended up crushing week 5. With the “soon” addition of TR allowing “hours to train per day” this will further refine the plans. All that being said, I still think TR is wrong in prescribing more SS on Sundays in most of their plans. It’s just too much.
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Can’t see them splitting features/pricing into tiers. Partly because I think it conflicts with TR’s mission statement of making people faster. If they think a feature makes you faster (which is what most of the AT marketing is saying) then pretty hard to then say that not all users can have that feature. Unless the tiers are called “fast” and “not so fast”… And partly because this thread just confirms how many different ways there are of using TR and what weight people put on different features depending on age, experience, goals, whether they do multisports, etc. So the features don’t really break down into a nice standard vs premium set. And Strava have demonstrated just how bad an idea it is to go down the route of having lots of different feature packages to subscribe to.
I’m a >5 year user with $99 pricing. I’m not going to get emotional about what Nate did or didn’t promise, I wasn’t even aware of that commitment until I started listening to the podcasts and using the forum a few years after I initially subscribed. If or when they make changes to what I pay or what features I get I’ll make a decision then as to whether it’s still something I subscribe to. I do really like TR for the periods when I’m focused on improving performance, but there are also large chunks of the year where I’m not using it for much more than indoor Z2 riding either because I’m not doing intensity or else I’m getting my intensity elsewhere (races, group rides, etc). Lots of cheaper/free options for just spinning along in Z2 in the garage, so if I was having to justify my subscription on a cost/benefit basis I’d probably dial TR down to maybe half the year or less.
One other aspect which hasn’t been touched on I don’t think (haven’t fully read all 766 posts!) is the benefit to TR of having a base of users who are subscribed continuously for years. Not talking about the revenue stream (though that’s certainly a benefit), I’m talking about the data. I.e. capturing what people are doing when they’re not following TR plans, both on the bike and potentially off it (fairly sure the TR T&Cs enable them to capture all kinds of other health metrics like sleep, weight, HRV if that data is available via the integrations TR has). That’s got to be hugely useful in developing and fine tuning new features.
Fair enough, a perfectly reasonable response….so given the competitors I laid out above (Zwift $15/month; System $129 / year, $15/month), would you leave TR?
That is the core issue specifically because it means programmers on teams are not being released from prior projects to work on new ones because their work is not done yet. Hence the need for more revenue to hire more people to develop new features. Repeat that cycle a few times and you end up having to ditch legacy pricing.
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