I’m from that area. What town are you in?
From last week; Monday was a rest day… You can see that Saturday, 27APR, I had to dial down 10% to get through the final set of Izaak Walton -2.
Dahlonega, Lumpkin County Georgia
Ah. Well not as a close I as thought. Southwestern VA for me. I hear Appalachians and just assume.
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@Sarah Thanks and some solid training! Did moving the slider to more aggressive remove the yellow days?
This is a quick screengrab of my calendar as zoomed out as I can get before the site gets angry
It’s pretty representative of the last couple of months. 15 of 28 days are yellow. I just reset my slider yesterday (not sure when it was reverted, the last I knew it was at aggressive in early March but I don’t check that screen often), but yesterday and today have not triggered yellow. Too soon to tell if the change will move the needle, I suspect it will a bit.
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@Sarah yeah I can see how seeing all that yellow would be annoying. On the positive side… Your training looks super consistent!
I notice that after a longer endurance ride (over 100 TSS) it almost always triggers a yellow. Then when some form of quality is done the next day, you stay in yellow until a recovery day. For example, a block of training from the 14th to the 16th includes a 3 hour endurance ride, followed by a tempo, followed by VO2. I can see how that might trigger some caution.
From a fundamental standpoint I think it is working right… and because of your consistency you never hit any reds! I tend to do an easy/hard approach and do not see many yellows or reds (as long as I take a recovery day after a big day). Maybe if you take an easy day after the long endurance ride that could help “clean” up the yellows? Or… as I think you have already done, slide to the more aggressive scale to see if that helps?
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I’m 56 and have Atrial Fibrillation so I’m quite interested in RLGL, consultant is fine with me exercising, just not doing crazy hours like I used to.
Like others have said it seems to directly contradict intervals.icu, any guidance on which to actually follow?
Does TR even include / recognize Walks at all? Judging by my TR calendar the only workouts which are pulled over are rides. No hikes, no strength & conditioning. While I could understand the latter and simply know that TR (and every tool which they introduce) is woefully unaware of my real training load and what I do (can’t really expect it to read my mind, now can I) I also accept the fact that it lacks even the simplest of tries to incorporate outdoor rides and other activities like hikes etc to meaningful extent.
Much like I don’t expect the my tool bench to know which size of screw I’m about to turn in and hand me over the right size screw driver. But it’s nice to have a tool bench. It’s just so that this tool bench is advertised as a mechanic… but that, it is not. But I also don’t expect it to be.
Not officially, you have to record them as runs to get them into the TR ecosystem.
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It does include outside rides, but the rest of your point stands
I would follow whatever your legs and body are telling you.
RLGL works perfectly for me, as soon as I feel a lot of fatigue in my legs and struggle through a workout, the very next day RLGL schedules an easier endurance workout.
If RLGL is consistently recommending easier workouts, and your body feels fine, then I would follow your intervals.icu CTL graph. My CTL graph and RLGL recommendations line up very closely between the two programs, so I would assume I am just lucky that my recovery profile matches the initial data used to develop RLGL (which should get better over time for those that find it unreliable).
That is interesting, thanks! Have you changed your RLGL settings at all to be more aggressive? I’m 56 so I wonder if RLGL takes age into account more than Intervals?
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Hey @Sarah, first let me tell you… You are a BEAST!
Thank you for all your feedback, we really appreciate it 
I definitely agree that you have the capacity to follow a TR High-Volume plan, otherwise, we’d be seeing a Calendar full of Red days instead of Yellow days.
I dove a little deeper into your Calendar and wanted to share some thoughts.
RLGL
RLGL monitors your training to help prevent long-term fatigue and it tells you when you might be overdoing it with Red and Yellow days on your TrainerRoad Calendar.
RLGL doesn’t tell you if you can do today’s workout or not, in fact, you could complete a workout perfectly, but if you push past the boundary of productive fatigue, RLGL will recommend adaptations to keep your training high-quality and consistent.
Think of it like spending on your credit card when you’re close to your limit. Every workout has a cost. Yellow and Red days are warning signs you are spending too much. If you are spending too much, you have to adjust your spending habits to get back on track.
Training History
Again, WHAT A BEAST! haha.
By looking at your Calendar I see that prior to starting the High Volume TR Plan on April 15th, you were completing mostly outside unstructured riding.
Since March 1st you’ve had one week of rest (March 11th-17th) and then 4 weeks with a massive ramp-up in training hours compared to past weeks. One of these weeks even got to the 18 hours of training, so I am not surprised you were on the yellow that much.
If anything I would say RLGL effectively knows how much training you can sustain, because otherwise, it would have given you a lot more Red days. This becomes more apparent when you look at the following weeks after your rest week:
-Training Week March 18th-24th (13:11 hours total) RLGL gave you 2 Yellow days
-Training Week March 25th-31st (17:43 hours total) RLGL gave you 6 Yellow days and 1 Red day
-Training Week April 1st-7th (13:01 hours total) RGLGL gave you 3 Yellow days
-Training Week April 8th-14th (18:43 hours total) RLGL gave you 5 Yellow days
Looking at the above, and some of your Post-Workout Survey Responses I see a natural relation between hours trained, per hours needed to recover, especially on the 4th training week when the body is just about ready for another Recovery Week, which got skipped going straight into a HV TR Plan on April 15th.
I like to think of it this way; Rather than thinking about how much time do I have available to train, it is better to think about how much training can I efficiently recover from.
TR Plan
Looking at the plan since you first started it, I can see that the Yellow Days are easing up as you get through it. Setting the Training Approach to Aggressive again, sure has helped a lot with Yellow Days as well since last week you only received one.
Final Thoughts
RLGL is here to make recommendations to prevent long-term fatigue, and we’re always going to recommend you take them, but at the end of the day you know yourself best! You’ve been doing this for a while and I am confident you can make a good call to accept or decline recommendations. For athletes who are just not as in-tunned with their bodies/training load and cannot easily sense fatigue, RLGL is a great tool to start addressing these aspects of training.
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No worries. And I just checked, my RLGL is set to balanced, I haven’t touched it since it was implemented. That is true, you might have a higher recovery rate than RLGL expects at your age? Maybe you could lower your age by 10 years in TR and see if it helps.
Also, I tend to be quite conservative with my survey responses. For example, I won’t select “Hard” unless the workout really pushed me and drained my legs.
Hey Texas thanks for the post. I’m 59 years old. This 2024 season has been the first time that I’ve been consistence riding my bike used to race back in the 90s and early mid 2000, now I’m just a weekend warrior doing group rides to maintain fitness. I just did a hard grp ride this Saturday, I was not expecting red day and to take a rest day on Sunday but it also shows a rest day on Monday and on Tuesday I have a sweet spot indoor session. I decided to follow your lead and trust the process What I notice is that my legs are not recovering quickly as I would like always seem to feel sore anyway once again thanks for your post.