How should I be marking a race survey response? If I select All Out I get asked why I “struggled” and get given a list of reasons like I would on a normal work out e.g Fatigue, Injury etc. I’ve just been selecting “Other” and then adding commentary to say “this was a race.”
Am I missing something? These are planned events on my calendar so TR should know it’s a race event. It seems there should be an option for “Race” on the survey response.
Honestly. Just answer it honestly.
That’s not really the point here. I get that’s how to respond to training work outs rather than trying to game the system/control the output.
But this is different. I select “All Out” because it was a race, and so I went all out, and then it immediately asks me why it was difficult. It was difficult because I went hard. Not because I felt ill, or tired, or stressed, or had an injury…
“All out” due to “intensity,” right? Generally that’s why races feel all out to me. I think it’s just telling the AI, please don’t try to ramp me up aggressively from this effort. This was the most I could do on the day
“Intensity” would seem to be the closest but even then this is how they define intensity.
So it doesn’t quite fit. It wasn’t “too much”.
I’m getting the impression that I’m not doing something wrong somewhere else that would change the survey, and so I guess, my suggestion would be to have a “this was a race effort” option. I can only imagine that would help with their data.
You’re right that there should be different descriptions for race intensity. That said, if the effort you put out in the race were a workout… the power targets would be too high. My last race my legs felt like they were exploding. It was all out, because of intensity. Fill it out how you like, but saying “all out due to intensity” is explicitly signaling to the AI information about ramp rate
" It was difficult because I went hard. Not because I felt ill, or tired, or stressed, or had an injury…"
No I think you’re doing the correct thing by selecting 'other. That’s the honest response. 
Definitely don’t select ill, tired, stressed, injured. I’m 100% certain that during the development of Adaptive Training somebody on the team posed the question, ‘What if the workout was a race?’
But even if they didn’t, all you can do is answer as honestly as you can.
I think the main purpose of the responses is to help dictate ramp (or de-ramp) of future workouts. Unless you are associating the race with a defined workout (which would likely be suspect at best), I assume the response on a race is just an interesting historical FYI (but could help inform AI models). Also, at some point AT will be able to project unstructured rides/races into some meaningful adaptations (used to inform future workout ramp/type suggestions) and having the response at that point is pretty important. Still, the profile of most mass start races makes a meaningful response tough since the objective is so different from training. Every tues/thurs vo2 or threshold workout for me is going to be tagged as hard or very hard (or even all out). Many road races would be tagged as easy to moderate unless you end up in an extended break or it has really long climbs. With the exception of TT’s and long endurance events where you are intentionally draining the tank, it’s really rare I’m pushing at the same intensity factor (overall) in races as I see during interval training (ie races are much lower TSS per hour). I’d guess these are the kind of factors that are making it take so long to release AT for unstructured rides.
There are some good thoughts here!
First, I wouldn’t consider “All Out” race efforts any different than a TrainerRoad workout of the same effort level. If the intensity is super high, mark it as such. High IF rides are going to be difficult, and we know that! 
As of now, survey responses for unstructured rides won’t trigger adaptations in your plan. These surveys are super important, though, not only for your own benefit, but the data helps to improve Adaptive Training too. Surveys for unstructured rides such as races are particularly valuable to us right now during our ongoing efforts to launch Workout Levels V2, so we appreciate the feedback!
It’s good to push yourself from time to time with efforts like these, and you will not be negatively impacted for rating an all-out effort as “All Out.” From there, simply select the reason for which it felt that way.
For a refresher on how we describe each of the survey responses, along with more general info, check out the “Post-Workout Surveys” support article!
