It was in response to the earlier post in which somebody implied that if you’re following a plan, you shouldn’t ever have red days. So I was more curious if that’s actually the case.
Awesome! Many thanks!
It’s a cool feature and has me considering coming back to TR (among other features), but I still hope the granularity improves. I think it would be very beneficial to have it ever changing over time. One example I can think of is similar to the example I used. Say you do a hard ride and wake up the next morning and it’s red light, but then it gives you a little note saying something along the lines of, “workout in the evening instead of morning” or “red light until 4PM” then it turns to yellow at that point. Sort of like Garmin gives you a recovery time. So after a workout, it says “Red light for 24 hours.” Or “Easy workout in 12 hours, moderate workout in 24 hours.” Or something along those lines.
Nate has a hint for you:
Understood and agreed of course. My reason for talking so much about stage races is probably something almost no one else cares about. For years my goals were big 1 day events and TR did a great job preparing me for 1 day events in spite of that I A) don’t train that much and B) have poor consistency due to work and 2 small / constantly sick children.
My realization last year was that while I could achieve relatively good 1 day performance within those constraints, repeating it for say 6 days straight at a stage race is an entirely different story.
My constraints on time, kids, job aren’t going to be that different this year so I highly doubt that I’m going to come in with sufficient volume that I’ll have no red days like you’re seeing with pro athletes… but red or not I’m not going to let it get to me psychologically during the race. Regular people aren’t pros and very often aren’t ideally prepared, and that’s fine.
Overall I’m very happy with RLGL, this is a great addition.
Interesting. I did something similar to that recently where I knew I had 4 days (Fri-Mon) I wouldn’t be able to ride at all. So I did 4 SST/Threshold workouts in a row over 4 days (Mon-Thur). I’m now really curious to see how it would have rated the subsequent workouts.
If you schedule a rest period, so say 4 hard workouts on back to back days, then schedule “vacation” time after, would that affect the RLGL? Or is just looking at the recent training?
Im not going to lie, I’m considering resubscribing just to look back at my training history.
Yea, this is what I was actually looking for. Hopefully rolling out soon.
Carried out my threat and did the 90min stretch SS workout, unsurprisingly it’s turned tomorrow from amber to red and wants to adapt to a rest day.
The last of nine intervals was not fun, but what I would have regarded as just a hard workout. I wouldn’t normally have rested tomorrow, I’ll see how my legs are.
RLGL is not predictive at this time. It does not look or consider the future, only what you have done and recommends the next day. RLGL is a recommendation based on the past. Only you know the future so can adjust upcoming rides accordingly. Red doesn’t mean bad and necessary to stop, it means warning.
If my Low Fuel or Oil Change light comes on I don’t immediately pull over. I consider where I’m going and when I need/able to address said warnings. It’s a concern but not an emergency.
Awesome to see this, Thank you TR! I had a look back over the last few months of my calendar to see how it applied retrospectively. Quite a few reds (about one every two weeks) & littered with yellows (some periods more yellow than not-yellow). Lots of things to blame for that, including but not limited to group rides, adding extra volume, stacking days together because of work constraints (see yellow annotations for crazy hours), stacking workouts same day (like a South Twin -3 literally minutes before the prescribed threshold) & generally just being a goose & a maximalist.
However… I seem to have less yellow days than I think I should. I was particularly interested to see its response to some long rides in excess of 10 hours & 350 TSS. After rides on Nov 12 & Jan 27 I was surprised to see only a single red day after them, & a clear day following, such as on Nov 14 when I still felt a bit cooked & I had a go at Crag anyway, only to fail it pretty badly (but I find Crag to be a pig of a workout anyway so I wasn’t too bothered, nor was I surprised). I was still too torched on Nov 16 to finish Red Lake (probably also because of Crag).
Then last month, if I hadn’t injured my wrist on Jan 27, I feel I could’ve done some sort of otherwise-achieveable endurance ride on the 29th, but certainly not a productive threshold or sweetspot workout, so perhaps in both situations there should’ve been one or two yellow days after the red. Just bringing this to the attention of @ming & @Nate_Pearson to help fine-tune RLGL’s response to long rides.
Calendar screenshots for the benefit of other readers:
November 2023:
January 2024:
It is not a yellow day because you took a recovery day. (My understanding is) that this is not a fatigue monitor (how would it know that) but rather a training monitor. It is telling you to not go hard after a big day.
I agree @Nate_Pearson. Big days don’t seem to be handled with enough care. I’d expect Red day then at least 1 if not 2 Yellow days. No way 1 day off the bike means back to normal training the following day.
Why do you need more than one day off?
Have you seen the trainwreck over in the “Do I really need a day off” thread?
It also now is on the PC App. Maybe the update that just downloaded, or it took some time for the apps the sync.
I know some get frustrated that shiny new features take a long time to deliver, but I appreciate TR taking the time to build the right tool and releasing it once it’s reasonably ready (obviously nothing is perfect, especially on day 1). Love this, the masters/high recovery plans, PB updates to allow more scheduling flexibility. Finally getting over some vitamin deficiency stuff and excited to resubscribe imminently. This is all super cool. Chapeau, TR team.
In October I had a 4.5 hour 350 TSS day. RLGL shows 1 red day for me also. On that day my CTL was 79 and my Form was 15. After my red day off, I could have done endurance of some sort, but I wasn’t interval ready.
I also had a 631 TSS day last year. For that I got a red the next day and then a yellow the day after that. For that event my CTL was 100 and my form was 24.
Ultimately I think the amount of reds and yellows you receive will be dependent on your historical training load leading up to the big events. If you traditionally have big tss days throughout your history, it may err on the conservative end when applying red and yellow days.
Here is an example of my seasons big ride last fall (more tss/less duration), and I don’t historically include BIG rides like it. It applied the reds/ yellows very much like I expected it would…
ETA: while it doesn’t show in my screen cap… my overall IF for that ride was .78, which will also likely play into the reds/yellows…
If I am reading that screenshot correctly it looks like AT wanted to adapt five future workouts. Were all five adaptations RLGL related or were there the regular “you completed a workout, time to adjust your future workouts based on your RPE survey and new PL level” adaptations?
If the case is the latter that is kind of a deal breaker for me with regards to RLGL. I would that RLGL would come as a separate set of adaptations from regular AT adaptations so I could choose to ignore RLGL and keep my regular workout progression/regressions.
@Nate_Pearson Do RLGL adaptations come separately from regular AT adaptation or could they potentially be lumped together where it is an “all or nothing” situation?
Seems that the more a ride trades intensity out for duration, the less predictable the result. Those two rides of mine were my only two >300k & I deliberately kept at an easy pace, like under .5 IF, not so I could ride the next day, but so I could do things other than sleep the next day & actually be a functional human.
Good question! I personally would like to be able to accept or decline proposed adaptations on a per-workout basis, which is not currently an option with AT adaptations.
I presume RLGL will only affect the days it expects that the recently-completed workout’s fatigue will affect (short term); AT adaptations in my experience anyway, only affect following weeks, say you fail a Threshold workout, it only changes the following Threshold workout, which, if you’re not fiddling about with the plan by manually shifting days around, will be the workout one week away, or 3 or 4 days if on a plan like Polarised mid volume. By failing a Threshold workout, AT should not for example change a Sweetspot workout in two days’ time. But… (just my prediction) if you do something silly like I’ve done before & go on a two-hour bunch ride which gives you a yellow day the next day, but then after the bunch ride attempt a two-hour threshold workout & fail it or quit at 1h30, you’ve accumulated a lot of TSS, there’s a chance that the next day with a workout on it will go yellow too then you’ll end up with both AT adaptations & RLRL adaptations at the same time. @Nate_Pearson this then begs the question: if I go on a drop ride in the morning before work, then in the evening fire up TR to do a “Productive” workout scheduled for that day, is it going to tell me not to do that workout?