That hasn’t been my experience, but I’m sure it’s true for some and maybe it could use some fine tuning. I’m all for making good better. I’m curious as to how Truchas +3 would rate as a Threshold workout. Maybe I’ll build it at 95% in workout creator and see.
All good points and agree with all of them. I too have found that limiting VO2 to one session every 7-10 days definitely prevents the “expiration date” and burnout that comes with a block of strenuous training. This is great for us who are just staying for year round or maybe racing a series.
On the other side of this, even though it is old school, it still seems to be the most effective way to peak for that ONE all-in race at the end of the season.
But I’m with you… for me, less frequent VO2 works. But that’s also why I like the tempo/SS type of workouts. Working under the maximum helps push up that line. But that’s me.
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I’d be curious what your 1 minute power is as a percent of your ftp, mine is only 140% so doing 150% multiple times just can’t happen and doing 135% really beats me up. I feel like these workouts need to have an anaerobic progression level attached to them. I wish they’d at least write the target as a percent of 1 minute power in the ride notes or give some rpe suggestions to modify these workouts though.
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I’m with you. Both are hard, yet I would pick the 2h Eclipse anytime over the Truchas +3
I just did Passadumkeag, a SS PL 7.7 which had 3x15sec @ 190%, and got a taste.
The burn from that 60sec spike would basically stay the rest of the 24min.
It all depends how your Pwr Duration curve looks like at short durations.
There’s a wider variation of PMax for short durations and it doesn’t correlate well with FTP (source: figure 2 of https://wko5.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8042359203725-How-ILevels-Make-It-Possible-To-Individualize-Training-In-WKO5 )
Are you a sprint track racer racer or a TTer? Check out figure 3 to see two world champs’ curves.
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I think my power curve is very different than yours which would explain why we have very different experiences with the hard start stuff. My 1min power is probably around 200% of my FTP.
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I wonder if there’s a way to convert this stuff based on 1 min power - these 150% ftp efforts for you are 75% of your 1 minute, but 75% of my 1 minute is only 105% of ftp, so that can’t be right. Maybe i should be doing them at 125% of ftp and you should be doing them at 180% of ftp. (90% of respective 1 minute max)
TR is great, but you need a pretty deep and detailed understanding of how it works and how you work to get the most out of it.
Individualized workout levels would be an awesome feature, but probably nearly impossible to implement. If anyone can do it, it’s TR. I guess I’d suggest manually lowering those parts in-workout or avoiding the workout types that don’t jive with your power curve.
If only I could hold 77% of my 1 min power for an hour! I’m guessing that the ramp test underestimates your FTP while it overestimates mine. I’ve also been not-so-secretly hoping for an individualized FTP calc from the ramp test.
Easy to do yourself, and a solved problem on at least two other platforms.
Now if only these other platforms can develop a forum where people can talk about how great they are and how bad TR is. That’s the feature I’m most looking forward to.
Pre-AT for VO2/Anaerobic/Sprint workouts my fix was writing notes in the TR workout, what I could actually do, and using that information to guide intensity setting for future workouts. It wasn’t automated but it was individualized. I believe Erg can make that challenging, or not, but back then (pre-AT) I was using Erg and the TR VO2 workouts almost always were set too high. And anaerobic/sprint too low.
IMHO the AT and PL stuff is very good at individualizing vo2max workouts, even with Erg. I’d claim TR solved the individualization problem at least for vo2 intervals 2 minutes and longer.
Shorter intervals and differences between athletes become even larger.
Yep the Ramp test consistently underestimates my FTP, resulting in workouts too easy for me. aiFTP is much better, provided I keep Thresh PL in the 4 to 6 range.
This summer i faced this:
ramp underestimates FTP <. what i can do < aiFTP overestimates FTP if Thresh PL <4
I check my AI FTP regularly because I think it does a great job at tracking changes in your fitness, even though it may be off the mark for some.
But for training purposes, I have my training FTP set at a round multiple of 10. If I can’t do a threshold level 5.0, I bump it down 10 watts. Once I nail a level 8.0, I move it up 10W. 5W, may be a more appropriate increment for some. I pay attention to some of the other PLs, but those don’t impact my decision to change my training FTP at all.
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That’s similar to what I do now.
As aiFTP (with my low PL ) was pulling my ftp too high and ramp test too low, I reached out to TR support and they suggested I do Marion (Thresh PL 4.2, 3x12min at 98%) as a good wo to confirm FTP is set up correctly after aiFTP gives me a new value.
Once I can do Grey ( 2x20min @ 100%, Thresh PL 5.9), I have a decision to make:
a) do I want to train extensively (extend TTE ) ? keep pushing the Thres PL up
or
b) do I want to train intensively (bump up FTP ) ? then I run aiFTP detect
I think a vs b depends on A race event type and how close i am to it.
Since I won’t race until May and my A race is in July, I intend to do “b” and push up.
As I approach HC100 in July, I will want to extend TTE and I’ll go a.
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Just my two cents, I gotta agree the sweet spot with sprint can be absolute killers. Seem to be the only ones I bail hard on (aka replace the rest of the workout with endurance work or just fall off the damn trainer instead of dropping intensity a few %), like this one!
Maybe “Compound Workout Levels” or something where not only do you have to be at 6.x SS for this workout but also 5.x Anaerobic/Sprint for them to be recommended? Not sure if this has been discussed elsewhere or exists as a feature request, but if I were designing an AI driven ML training platform where people could crap all over it in its own forum, that’s what I would do!
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Dude you did half of it!! Kudos!
Sounds horrible! I’m gonna have to try a Chicoma 
wow the Chicoma -5 is a PL 6 and there’s even a +2 version.
How many times are you working to 100% exhaustion? Every workout? Once in a while?
I just did Gray two days ago, but I rated it very hard, and I am not confident that my sustainable power is any higher. Once threshold starts to feel like SS, probably about PL 8.0, a bump is in order.
I figure that if your training week has V02 or anaerobic, you can continue to raise those PLs, allowing for plenty of intensity, while working on TTE with SS and threshold.
Once every couple months, to be honest. I think the levels are pretty good. That one was an absolute outlier for me.
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Once i reach PL 6 ish, let’s say after Gray (PL 5.9) I don’t know if it’s more efficient for FTP gains to
- extend duration ( Thresh PL 5 → PL 7 8 ) first
or - bump FTP up with AT nerfing PL down to 3 or 4 ?
Maybe there’s science on this !?!
However, I will say that I feel it’s easier to do a Thresh 4.x after a FTP 3% bump than to do Thre PL 7 or 8 at initial FTP. Easier to recover from also.
Take a look at Thre PL 7 or 8 wo that lasts 1 hour! 
They’re the monsters with spikes from the OP.
Maybe it has to do with available time. At Thr PL 3, 4, 5 , there are options across all durations. That increases consistency as sometimes i cannot fit in a 90 or 120min wo.
I’m about to do Gray again - wish me luck.
The scientific literature of interventions doesn’t use PLs. What were you doing? Something like 2x20-minutes at threshold.