I was considering quitting TR partially due to the AI FTP bits (I primarily train outdoors) but mostly because I wanted to do a ‘time to exhaustion’ base season over the next couple of months with mostly sweetspot work, going from 2x20 to 1x90 over the next few months, and allowing me decent recovery between intervals in order to do so.
After looking around at alternatives, Intervals.icu seemed the closest thing with the plans on there, or TrainingPeaks with a plan. But I wanted a workout player, too, a bit of seamlessness. Enter the workout creator. I figured - ok, I’ll set up these workouts and see how TR responds to it.
I was very surprised when:
- The workouts instantly transferred from the easy-to-use workout builder to the website
- The workouts had levels assigned to them that roughly speaking matched up sensically (eg. 2x20 with big rest was around a 5 or 6, then 1x45 was 7.6, that kind of thing.)
- Once I placed them into the calendar, they worked seamlessly with yellow/red days
- They also functioned nicely with the AI FTP calculator (even with my 3h @ 60%, then 20 min @ 80%, then 6 x 10-20s max sprints at 300% FTP)
All in all I was hugely impressed by this and will be staying on for a while longer.
I do wish some of the plans were able to be set a little more freeform, with workouts with longer/unlimited rest and maybe a ‘VO2 5 x 4 min @ max VO2, rest as needed’ kind of thing in there too, giving you a broad range for power targets and not dinging you for going over them or taking longer rest, but that’s another story.
Similarly I want to increase time to exhaustion at sweet spot and would love if I could add this as a sub-goal or a goal for a phase.
But all that aside, I really really am happy with the new feature I just discovered and how well it integrated with everything else. Thanks to whoever maintains or built it! (I’m guessing it’s a dogfooded tool that you guys maybe use to build workouts internally, too.)
