One week on/off, three in a row?

[joguar]

Hi

First winter season of training. No race event, and my first goal event is a pretty easy sportive (82km with 1200m climbing). Second goal “event” is that I personally want to do a 200km / 2000m ride (where the first climb is roughly 10km by 1km) with actual date tbd. I first started training SSBLV in April before getting injured, started SSBLV again around Oct/Nov and got properly consistent from mid Nov onwards). I do add a weekend group ride in the summer (TSS spikes) but in winter I’m more frequently on my own and cruising between Z2 and SS if I do get out on the weekend. Trying to really stick to plan builder as my FTP has gone 165 (Apr, prob under tested) → 165 → 197 → 207 Aug → 208 → 216 Dec → 222 Jan. I’m now in build phase and doing weight training twice a week as well. All feels fairly manageable.

Here is the question. I usually add annotations and just allow plan builder to do its thing but I have this weird result where it has suggested loads of rest weeks around my early March 1wk ski trip, which has created a pattern of REST / HARD / REST / HARD / REST. This feels like it wouldn’t be optimal, but I’m not sure the best way to adjust it.

As far as skiing goes, we do all downhill/off piste (no XC) and whilst we go fast we’re not exactly shredding ourselves. We’ll usually do 3/1/3 where the middle day is a spa day. There’s a lot of apres but I’m not much of a drinker, it just means little rest.

With that, I’m not sure how to adjust my plan to keep the upper end of aerobic up and also not waste several weeks of training just because the week of skiing is in the middle of this weird rest/hard cycle in March. What should I do?

[ZackeryWeimer]

Hey there and welcome to the TR community!

For clarity’s sake, I think everything on your TR Calendar looks “normal.” Your training blocks look to be the standard 3 weeks “hard,” 1 week “easy” – your ski trip just happens to fall right in the middle of one of those blocks (which has thus replaced the cycling workouts for that week), which may make it seem like Plan Builder is doing something strange here.

In terms of how your training is arranged, I think it’s actually pretty good as it is right now. Plan Builder organizes your training so that you get the best run-in possible going into your goal events. Going through a suboptimal week because of a ski trip now is generally the preferred approach over reorganizing things to make this one odd week “fit” while making this funky shuffling reappear later on in your plan (but much closer to your target event, where it’s most important to have your training dialed in).

I also don’t think you’ll waste weeks of training here – it looks like you have that one week set aside for the ski trip, but everything else is looking as I’d expect it to be. Plus, once you get back, Adaptive Training will make sure to make any changes needed to your plan to keep you moving in the right direction.

[joguar]

Good to hear, thanks Zack!

I suppose my concern is whether I’m missing out on having more optimal training by not reshuffling due to that ski week in the middle, but realistically on 3-6h a week, one week of missed training makes little difference and I can add a bit more Z2 volume to my overall plan to compensate