I’m definitely in the annual subscriber camp, and in fact haven’t paused my subscription through two long injury lay-offs (and am just starting a third - I broke my hip at the weekend!). The reasons for that (even before my legacy pricing was significant) go back to the value that I felt I was getting from the podcast, mainly, and I’m sure you’re well aware of how powerful the family effect is. A lot of your users are highly engaged with the company, so whatever you do, please don’t let that slip.
If I were more concerned about wasted cash during the summer months then I might switch to an outside only plan, however:
a) I’d need there to be more difference than just disabling access to the workout player. From what you say this a part of your thinking already. But otherwise I might be tempted to think “hey, that winter price is a lot extra just to be able to use the workout player software!”
b) I personally would want the option to be super flexible, either to flick between options month by month, or even pay a couple of dollars for a single workout or a day indoors! The obvious downside being that some might downgrade on the basis that they can flick back if they want to, who otherwise would just maintain indoor mode. So maybe 5 dollars per workout.
Hmm, this is complex. Maybe I should have thought before I started typing…
I would love this as well, but I do think we will need an ‘exclude from powerlevel calculation’ button on outside workouts. Having to train to the level you reach on those magic days sounds like a poor idea.
I think that is the missing part, one but not the other. I think we want the days we go super super deep to be in our PRs, we just dont want them in the PLs cause they are not meaningful training guides.
Hrm. This is interesting if you chew on it. I suppose you did the work so you are capable.
So At has to know to discount those standout workouts. It can see if you tapered. I can see if you are rested. The part it probably does not know about is if you were pulling for your buddies and had that extra mental part you cant summon for normal workouts that can amount to an awful lot.
You could probably catch that sort of stuff by just discounting outliers. Having delta from your last X days PR curve as a feature probably buys you the ability to keep those huge workouts from having an outsized impact but still being useful.
I hate it that you cant talk about this stuff. I totally understand why, its just so interesting its a damn shame the economics of it have to keep it in the dark.
Yeah, true, that would help certainly to capture what areas have been trained. Although I was also talking about this more broadly. As far as I know none of TR’s plans make explicit accommodations for rides where we can focus on bike handling skills, pacing and the like. Yes, we can replace workouts with outdoor rides, this has been the topic of many questions in the podcast. But I think it would be helpful if the assumption that people tend to ride outdoors at least once a week were built right into the training plans as the default.
One idea I have is to allow athletes to select what kind of rides they want to do on e. g. Sundays, and they can select between a free outdoor ride, an indoor sweet spot workout and an indoor endurance workout as the default. If the rider selects an outdoor workout, you could suggest different tasks to the athlete like practicing pack riding skills, pacing or e. g. keeping your heart rate below 130 bpm as optional goals.
You could make these suggestions depending on the plan they choose: someone who has picked the crit plan could get pack riding skills as homework and someone who chose the XC marathon plan a skills session.
You can choose to have any day be an outside ride. It’s really hard for us to tell the general user to “practice pack riding” as they might not know what/how to do that or have that available to them.
I think the idea is you could designate a day(s) as “free ride” outside. E.g., I always do a group ride on Saturday’s, so my schedule should just have this as the default for Saturday.
Although my suggestion was to add third option in addition to indoor and outdoor workouts, an option to schedule a free ride. In the summer I — like tons of TR users — have regular team and group rides, and it’d be nice if by default I could just schedule them in Plan Builder for each stage of my training plan. (Just to be clear, I am just making this suggestion to make TR more appealing to people riding outdoors, which is the topic of this thread.)
I think that becomes more relevant once outdoor rides are analyzed by AT, i. e. TR would adapt my training plan for the next week depending on whether I went for a mellow endurance ride or let it rip with a few mates of mine.
I’m new to trainer road (a few months) and am loving it. I’m not sure why an outside plan would matter. I do probably half my workouts outside anyway. I do live in FL so I get plenty of straight flat roads to do intervals on, but for my purposes inside and outside workouts are about the same. I would love to have my rides outside of trainer road count for adaptations and ftp calculations, not sure if it already does that.
My question would be; if I do a ride that is outside my training plan but I just set it up as an endurance ride with train now, will that “count” for something in the AI?
And my comment; I love the software and binge the podcast. You guys and girls really are great! I sent a link to the podcast (on YouTube) to my 16 year old neice who is just starting out mountain biking. Her comment was, “this is what happens when nerds become athletes”. That might apply to all of cycling really. Anyway, it was worth a laugh and I thought I’d pass it on.
Keep doing what you do.
One thing I would like to see on the Outdoor workouts is some sort of score on the execution. Indoors we know if we nailed it or not. Outdoors has way more variability. It shows in the interval as a range and I do try to keep it in range. Sometimes because of where I am at I cant hit the lap to start the next interval and I know that added recovery time is defeating some of the effectiveness of the next interval.
It counts for some things (Like AI FTP Detection) but it doesn’t count for progression levels. We’re working on making them count for progression levels.
When is V2 coming? I’m outdoor only and decided to try TR, but I don’t think I can stick with it so long as it can’t value my non TR workout outside stuff.
That will be very cool, and I think for us “outsiders”, the planning functionality, along with AI FTP estimation and accounting for the JRA workouts we do, would make for a compelling package.
I can’t wait for this “Levels V2” release. I’m looking forward to following a training plan and try out adaptive training, but at the moment, it’s just too much of a headache figuring out how to combine the plan with my unstructured weekend rides. I know could try a LV plan and add the outside rides, or I could try a HV plan and replace the outside rides with workouts, but both of those options sound like work-arounds. I signed up for TrainerRoad to spend less time behind a computer making custom plans and workouts, but making the combination of following a plan and adding unstructured fun outdoor group rides work, means I have to spend way too much time editing the plan the whole time.
Thinking about it, it would really be cool if TR could analyze your outside riding and suggest complementary workouts indoors to maintain your fitness or even to complement a plan
