I dug through the forums and could not find a post that answered my question well, but if it exists please link below!
I like to do my endurance rides outside with TR, but often the routes from my doorstep do not perfectly match up with the prescribed ride. For example: I have a MTB loop from my doorstep thats a 30 minute climb, and 15 min descent. I paired this with the 30 minute ‘king’ ride, as for that 30 minute climb I’m hitting the power targets, but the descent is relatively chill and downhill all the way home. My TSS at the end of the ride matches up to king, but my elapsed time riding does not.
should I: Change the king ride to something longer (like 45 min saddleback), or change the king ride to a ‘solo ride’ and just let TR AI adapt my plan after the ride, or just mark the ride as King and leave it be.
Alternatively: what if its like a TR prescribed 2 hr endurance ride and I end up riding for 3 hrs, do i match the rides? find a closer TSS/timed TR ride and then match them? or just change the TR ride to a solo ride?
I do not care about or look at my progression levels
I am more concerned if my AI FTP detect is affected by me changing my structured indoor rides into outdoor or solo rides.
I will not stop my computer mid-ride to save as a 30 minute file or whatever, and then restart my computer to record a ‘second’ ride, that would drive me crazy.
With the new system once the ride is done you really have no reason to try and associate it with something else. *
For prediction of both ftp and fatigue detection it could make sense to mark something like this a solo ride a head of time and adjust the time/target TSS to your needs.
But once you are home there is no reason to need to associate it with something that it isn’t, even a solo ride.
stopping/starting/recording it as more than one ride won’t help anything, may hurt it as the system seeing 2 workouts vs one may treat that differently for fatigue even if the total TSS was the same.
*edit, if you load up a workout and do that workout outside to the targets then sure for AL purposes it may make sense to match it. but if its jus oh I did similar TSS but not the actual workout, then it doesn’t make any sense to arbitrarily associate something post ride.
With the old system for outdoors HIIT workouts, Start the computer and ride to a safe place and then with the computer still running I’d go into the workouts menu and start it then. That might work for you.
Just delete it. What it wanted you to do no longer has any bearing on the system, just what you did.
If you don’t start the ride as a workout on your computer then it won’t attempt to assign it when you get back. If it randomly associates it you can tell it to undo it and then delete the “incomplete” workout.
Either switch it to a solo ride and adjust that time to the time you think you are doing if you must associate something. Or just don’t associate it. It doesn’t sound like you are doing the workout, just doing an amount of work similar to the workout. So there is nothing to gain from associating it with something you didn’t do.
Really I don’t think the AI adaptions/FTP is that deep, it takes into account what you do, so from what I have read and listened to, if you call it that workout and ‘match it up’. It would be the equivalent of doing a Indoor Structured WO on trainer, but then adding on 10min warmup and 30min cooldown endurance time.
For me - I like to keep the system clean and informed, so that it can prescribe and predict properly. So for me - I would be adjusting/editing the planned workout to be similar to my planned outdoor ride.
So if I knew that Sunday 2hr Endurance was going to be 3hr I would just go into TR and edit the length to 3hr. Or maybe 2.5hr if I was unsure, but knew it was more than 2. That way it would have the TSS and fatigue already baked into the coming week(s). If changed soon enough before Sunday, say Wednesday evening… it might even update the workouts for Thur, Fri, Saturday before Sunday. But if the ride just goes long because it was fun, sandy, slower… no biggy the TSS and power/HR/zones are what they are and AI will react (vs plan for it).
I’m on a plan but due to ridiculously great wx I’ve just been doing unstructured outdoor rides. Those rides upload to TR and it makes adaptations to the plan based on those. I don’t delete the plan’s prescribed workouts and don’t identify the outdoor rides as Solo Rides or anything else. I will admit that since those unstructured rides don’t give the same training stress as the prescribed workouts (usually greater) my predicted FTP goes down. Oh well. Blame the weather.
I’d also suggest switching to Solo Rides in these situations.
If you know you’re not going to precisely follow the prescribed workout before you leave, switch it to a Solo Ride by right-clicking on the workout in your calendar.
Associating a ride that doesn’t match won’t bring any benefits, and we support putting solo rides in your calendar, so as others have already said, there isn’t really any downside to this.
Of course, structured training will likely be more productive than pedaling around, but that’s a different discussion, and there are definitely benefits to simply pedaling around from time to time.
I was advised previously that this wasn’t necessary and didn’t do anything different than simply having the unstructured ride uploaded TR. What does changing a planned workout to a Solo (or Group) Ride and associating an unstructured ride with it do that’s different than simply not doing it?
I guess not much, other than give you some light guidance as to how to structure your ride in the description.
The main thing is to ensure that you’re not pairing your ride with the scheduled workout when it comes into TR. Deleting the workout or switching to a Solo Ride does help there..
That’s awesome. I really like that I can just do what I do, unstructured rides, a random workout, or even maybe an actual scheduled workout, and the plan just adapts without me doing anything other that rating the difficulty of my activity. With the wx here this winter being so uncharacteristically nice, I’ve mainly been doing unstructured rides and have done very few of the planned workouts, 3 in 5 weeks to be exact. The plan and FTP prediction seems totally happy with that and just adapts as I go.
My strategy is to plan an outdoor workout so I have an idea of what a good session would be. I try to take very general guidance or goals from those. For example, a recently had a 1,5h 5 x 9min Sweetspot session. I can’t do many longer intervals safely around here so I just read that session as “rack up minutes at sweetspot” and tried to maintain sweetspot everywhere I know I have more than a couple minutes.
I then switch to Solo ride before I leave just to be ‘correct’. Not sure that it even matters.
