For whatever reason, when I rate an outdoor group ride as “hard”, it almost always comes back with the follow-up questionnaire asking why this workout was hard, even when it was supposed to be hard. Is this a new thing? In the past, I have only seen that follow-up questionnaire when my response didn’t match the expected response.
For example, Thursday was scheduled to do 90 min over-under threshold efforts. TSS of 101. I alternated the training to “Group Ride” and did a race simulation group ride that was bookended by 25-ish min warm up and cool-down (to get to and from). The total time riding was around 2 hours, with the intensity group ride part being around 80 minutes long. Total TSS was 137. While my total time in Threshold may have been a bit lower than what was prescribed on TR (3x10 min), there was an additional 18 min in vo2, anaerobic and neuromuscular. As you would expect with a race with hard sprints.
This was supposed to be a hard ride, and it was a hard ride, but when I rated it hard, it’s asking why it was hard.
I’m looking into this now for you—you should not get a “why was this hard?” survey on a group ride. Just to be specific, which group ride is the one you’re referencing here? I see a group ride marked “Hard” last Saturday, but one marked “Moderate” from 2 Thursdays ago that looks closer to the TSS you’re mentioning. Is that the one?
I had the same issue this Sunday, March 8th, for this outdoor ride when I wanted to rate Hard, I had the window “Nice job on pushing through! Help us understand the primary reason why today’s ride was challenging.”:
Yeah I have seen that too and it is kinda annoying. I rated a couple of clearly brutal rides as hard and the app still popped up like “why was this hard?”… well because I was breathing like a broken vacuum and my legs were toast, that’s why. I think the system just flags it when the data does not match the planned structure, like if you switch the workout type or pile up a bunch of VO2 and sprint work instead of the exact intervals. Happens a lot with group rides. Nothing wrong with your effort, the algorithm just gets confused sometimes.
