Hi TR team. I managed a 40m TT outside at 105% and associated it with a workout that was a good fit. That gave me a 6 PL bump on threshold.
I failed my next workout miserably so removed the association. But my PL’s never reverted from 8 back to 2. Is there a way to fix this? It’s been a month and my levels aren’t decaying.
Hey @adski,
I’m not 100% sure if this behavior is intentional or not, so I’m going to reach out to the team to see what they have to say… 
This is actually a perfect example of why we don’t recommend associating rides with workouts that you didn’t actually complete. 
This was basically a race effort, and if you tell the software that this was a normal workout for you and you were able to pass it, it’s going to think that these types of efforts should be a part of your weekly training.
Additionally, the work you did doesn’t actually match the intervals in the workout that you selected, so the data becomes a bit skewed.
You can actually fix this yourself by editing the activity and removing it from your Progression Levels as shown below. I did this for you and it looks like your Threshold PL is back down to 6.7
I’d avoid trying to match workouts to your unstructured rides moving forward. 
Nothing useful to add, but thanks for posting that screen shot of “big house”. Mental note to avoid that when looking for over/under workouts. When the “under” is 99%, that’s just a cruel joke calling it an over/under.
Fantastic Eddie, I wasn’t aware of that checkbox. The outcome of dropping PL’s down to 6 is in the right direction, but still surprising it’s so high. Threshold workouts are my kryptonite.
I hear your advice on not associating workouts with unstructured rides, and will take it on.
The interval on this ride seems highly structured though and a good candidate for associating with an outdoors workout. I used TR’s zone creation tool (great feature!) and the interval is 80% compliant.
What kind of compliance rules would the TR team recommend?
Honestly, at this point, we wouldn’t recommend associating rides with workouts at all unless you followed the structure of the workout entirely.
Our scoring tool is pretty complex, and unless your intentions were to follow a TrainerRoad workout closely, it’s kind of like comparing apples to oranges from the tool’s perspective. 
At some point, these situations won’t cause issues when we’re able to score all rides, not just our workouts with confidence and accuracy.
I do have one last question for you though. Did you find and associate this workout with your ride after the fact, or did you find the workout first and load it up to a head unit before the ride? If so, which kind did you use? It looks like Wahoo, but I just need to verify. 
Appreciate the honesty Eddie. I take that to seriously challenge the value of trying to use TR outside workouts at all. My read of this is that “the tool” can’t extract a single 40 minute interval from a ride that’s of a length different to the associated TR workout, and assess training benefit accurately.
This is one of those things where people get caught up in marketing hype around the magical AI/ML modelling. TR doesn’t analyse your activity to see what sort of rider you are, how strong you are, what would be ideal for your next workout… it gives you a workout, and based on whether you managed to complete it and how it felt according to the survey, it will adjust your PL, and therefore the set of available workouts from which to select next time. The actual work you did is completely irrelevant.
Separately, they look at the basics of your CTL/ATL/TSB (maybe their own version) to see how much you can cope with.
Ergo, if you do a threshold over-under stretch session, but spin along at 150w, and then mark it as easy, your threshold PL will go up and next time you’ll get a harder one. Outdoor workouts are indeed pretty pointless if you can’t actually do the workout as prescribed.
It’s funny because some people think there is crazy analysis of cardiac drift and the difference between different interval execution to ascertain how good your repeatability is to give you the perfect next workout… it’s rubbish. It’s way simpler than that.
FWIW, I think there is beauty in that simplicity and the clean way in that it is executed, that’s why I’m here. It’s also why I will leave in the summer, because TR can’t possibly advise me well when the majority of my riding is outdoors.
