Progression Level Percentages for Ironman

Is there a table or reference out there that would tell you the ideal percentage factors where your ideal progression levels would need to be entering into a race or event. For example an Ironman would be very heavy in the endurance category and not so much in the sprint category. Or a crit would be the opposite. Reason being TR does not allow you load in just bike workouts from the triathlon plans without having to delete all the swim and run workouts if you wanted to use your own. Looking to maybe use train now but not sure if TR would recognize the goal event “Ironman” in my case and not get sidetracked.

The desktop app used to have these:

in the plan descriptions. Last I looked they were removed. You could try asking support@trainerroad.com if those are not in the current desktop/mobile/web app.

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Those old charts (from long before Adaptive Training) looked like Progression Levels, but they were really just graphical representations of the relative focus of each plan. They were removed to avoid confusion with the Progression Level display.

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Yes, agree. However the plan’s focus might be useful for this part of the original question:

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I don’t think there are ideal progression levels. Although conceptually I hear what you’re saying.

For Ironman I think completing a 4-5hr endurance bike followed one hour brick run at race pace comfortably is a good measure. Last season for me that was Hoffman at 4.5h.

But everyone is different, newbies might be happier seeing a full distance or over distance ride which might be 7hrs ticked off.

Hoffman just so happens to be a 7.7 on the Endurance scale, which is scaled to your ramp test results. Great for progressive overload in training.

Imo, what you really want to know in the final weeks is how many watts you can hold for the duration and still run, not a training metric.

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And join us on The Thread when you can :wink:

https://www.trainerroad.com/forum/t/the-ironman-training-2021-thread

Totally agree with that brick workout. Planning on doing one at 6 weeks out and another at 4 weeks out to tweak anything that needed attention from the one at 6 weeks out. Are you using the full TR plan or just the bike workouts?

I use the whole TR tri plans throughout the season. I will adjust a discipline if there is a weakness I’m working on.

Looking at ‘ideal PLs’ is like asking what the ideal training plan is. PL’s just represent what type/relative difficulty of workouts you’ve been doing and even then, not very well.

For example I could do huge amount of longer and longer endurance work and build a high End PL. Or I could do huge amounts of threshold work (and get a high PL in Thr) and then simply do 1 very high rated End workout and achieve a high End PL as well. PL scores dont even show the history of your training very accurately - they only show what the rating of the hardest session you’ve done recently is.

As said above, its all about how many W you can hold for the duration of the bike leg and still run afterwards. For some they may achieve that through loads of z2/3 work while others may go a different route and do lots of z4/5/6 work, and any combination inbetween. There isn’t an ideal PL picture because there isnt an ideal training plan either - it will all depend on our history, strengths, limiters, time to train etc etc.