I use Trainerroad for my structure and outside only for fun and I keep the subscription active to keep you from merging with Zwift and keep pushing the innovation Trainerroad is known for.
The indoor training makes it possible for me as a father of 2 little kids to keep training with a baby monitor next to me, I don’t have to clean a bike when I get home, not depending on the weather, and it’s the most efficient use of the time I have available.
So I’d vote for a merged plan, where you actively have the option to follow “your” plan wherever you want to go that day.
I’m bumping this because you’ve described how I train. Very “structured” in terms of ramping up specificity and load toward goals, but not at the micro level of ‘X amount of watts for Y minutes with Z minutes of rest’.
@Nate_Pearson Does TrainNow factor in ad-hoc outdoor rides yet when deciding what sessions to suggest? I was debating restarting my subs but don’t want to commit to a plan as the weather improves and the only 45 minute plans appear to be the rather punchy time crunched one!
100% agree. I love TR and won’t let it go, but use intervals.icu quite a bit for their analytics. Don’t offer a outdoor only version, expand the existing version to provide better value for outdoors:
red light/green light for rest versus going hard
ability to log wellness items (e.g. hours of sleep, mood, motivation to train, weight) on a daily basis. TR has impressed on me the importance of mental health and working over the long haul. Reporting mood is really important to reminding me to sleep enough and eat enough)
Ability to set and report goals over a year (even better if they’re slightly gamified). I’d like to set goals around consistency, number of hours ridden per week, not around power PRs. If I’ve set a goal of riding 4 days a week, let me know how many weeks I’ve achieved that goal. Likewise for number of hours.
Give me the ability to designate an outdoor ride as a group ride or race. For both, give me a skill to work on and a short 5 min video that explains the skill.
better analytics showing how I’ve improved over time - particularly within a season. This can also be a comparison like - this season you’ve been more consistent.
let me know when I’ve hit a power PR for the season or all time.
ability to log strength training, yoga, running, swimming.
Finally, rather than offer outside-only, perhaps be slightly more aggressive on the discounting for yearly subscriptions. All of these give everyone an incentive to use the app more, whether outside or inside, and that’s the ultimate goal.
I subscribe year round. During the summer I do a mix a indoor and outdoor rides. (The weather in Ireland can be quite unpredictable)
A summer outside only plan would be of no benefit to me. Outside workouts give me the flexibily I need. I find I need the structure year round, so haven’t considered stopping my subscription during the summer.
I think the seasonality of TR is some of your own doing. I don’t hear it near as much, but there used to be a lot of preaching about how much more effective indoor training is (and it may be for lots of reasons). And the push was to use TR and do your training indoors. I think the push all along should have been to do smart structured training, whether that is indoor or outdoor. Build the plans so that people can insert their fun outdoor and group rides, but keep structure for other rides during the week. You indoor workouts are overly complex and the outdoor ones were at times overly dumbed down. There can be a happy medium that works for both. Stress smart training whether you do it indoors or out, and tailor you product to accommodate both.
I think countering seasonality with a tailored set of features will always remain a dilemma, no matter how you slice your product to catch the biggest userbase possible. Chances are, there will always be people that feel “left behind” because the package you offer does not match what they want. You could call this a Strava Dilemma.
My proposition:
Leave the product as it is. Instead, offer tiers such as 6-month / 9-month / 12-month, where the only difference is that you can actually perform the TR indoor/outdoor workouts during the respective number of months per year. You keep the calendar etc. and can track your “other” rides/activities with TR for the remainder of the year, but at reduced cost (and without the feeling of paying for something you’re not using).
Advantages:
Less complexity in development / maintenance of your product. Each user can define their seasons and save some money during off-season, but still have TR as calendar/data hub. No need to cancel subscriptions for off-season, reduced churn.
Optional (this might be controversial):
Get rid of grandfathering. Instead, offer discounts depending on how many years you are on the platform. Maybe more generous for currently grandfathered users, but also to some degree for future subscribers. Great for customer retention.
Maybe you already dismissed this option, but if it were my problem I would think in this direction. Strava already demonstrated what doesn’t work.
Whatever you do - I am sure you will find a “good” way considering all angles.
Been thinking a bit about this and was wondering if it’d be possible to have a limited library of indoor workouts for those rainy days as it seems that is fairly popular use case based on comments.
Keep them only available in TrainNow (so no plan builder) and either X number of indoor workouts a month or perhaps just a slimmed down library.
At least personally I’d rather have 5-10 indoor workouts a month vs unlimited outside workouts. Just not sure if that’s enough to justify a lower cost on the business end.
Interesting point and something I can appreciate. When I just do the odd indoor ride during summer, it is because I want to do some quality work in 45-90 minutes, and I have perhaps 4-6 different workouts I alternate between (6 x 5 min, 5 x 6 min, 3 x 8 min, etc.). I am very happy with TR in general and gladly pay for the 12 month subscription to support the company, but I’d think that a “TR Light” with a limited library may be more attractive during the outdoor months.
Overall I’m probably not the target audience for a paid analytics service but in terms of what analytics features would entice me, automated FTP estimation and FTP prediction based on scheduled work are the 2 most interesting to me and TR is on track to have both.
Back in my triathlon days I was an avid user of Training Peaks desktop and later Golden Cheetah, primarily because I wanted multi-sport TSS tracking and cumulative TSB/form/freshness etc. I don’t care about those as much these days, but for any multisport athlete tracking the other workout types and trying to do something meaningful with that data is key. Redlight / greenlight could count as sufficiently meaningful.
Beyond that, looking at the “competitors” in this space I like Strava for the social aspect and for tracking PRs against segments but I don’t care much for their analytics beyond that. I moderately prefer intervals.icu over TR’s analytics. In particular intevals.icu’s eFTP estimation has always tracked closely to my ramp results, but as has been noted it’s not equivalent to TR’s AI FTP feature since it requires you still do the ramp or other sufficiently maximal effort. Was nice to have the secondary validation though.
Truthfully, I think more than anything you have a marketing problem at this point. I think many cyclists associate trainer road with indoor workouts, and don’t realize how great the outdoor ecosystem is. Truthfully, there have been a few things that have been missing, but one of those just got nailed. Having a way of calculating FTP without doing a ramp test makes it possible to use the system outdoors solely. The only thing that is still missing, and you are working on, is capturing the data from unstructured rides and using that in adaptive training. With AI FTP, unstructured rides contributing to adaptive training, and then adaptive training itself, you have an incredible tool for training outside. You do not need the trainer at all.
With this being said, since it’s a marketing problem from my perspective, you could repackage the same system that you currently offer, calling it outdoor trainerroad, and perhaps change the opinions of many riders. You need people to realize that trainer road is not an indoor workout program that supports outdoor rides, but that it is a training system for all cycling applications.
I personally don’t think outside workouts/plans is the solution to keeping folk subscribing year round. Outside workouts won’t work for most people, with traffic, stops etc…
To keep people subscribing year round TR just needs to become the go-to place for planning/analysis. I visit Intervals.icu pretty much every day, so am happy paying to be a supporter.
If you build the calendar and analysis tools well enough, people will keep using TR all year, instead of only when they’re wanting to do TR workouts.
I’m a year round subscriber but barely use TR during summer months. The proposed outdoor features sound like a great addition for me. The biggest issue for me with outdoor TR workouts today is trying to fit the “round” TR workout peg into one of my “square” local route holes I like to ride. I would love to see some AI magic that could take all my local outdoor routes and build a training plan based on them. Any chance of that?
Around here, and in many parts of California, outside workouts absolutely work for most people. My coach prefers to prescribe short intervals, and I asked him why and his answer was because it can be hard for some to find enough road to do anything longer than 8-12 minutes. I also read that one reason CTS came up with the 8-minute FTP test was because it can be hard to find 20-minute section of road.
The value of outside is situational, depending on where you live. I’ll go so far as saying some of the fastest people I know simply ride a LOT and mix up hard climbing rides with fast group rides and flat-ish recovery/endurance rides. Neilson Powless recently commented on Strava that NorCal has some of the best roads for training in the world.
These are all very nitpicky things but since you asked:
UI is a little simpler by nature of it being more past-activity analytics focused. TR calendar view is more forward-planning focused but maybe it should be a bit of both?
Default calendar view allows single click to view WO analytics. TR offers this but through Past Rides which is somewhat ‘hidden’ under Career page. But yes I know 2 button clicks in calendar isn’t going to kill anyone.
Slightly prefer the data sources to be represented in separate swim lanes vs the single overlay. I know this personal preference. Having the extra space allows you to do swim lane specific context highlighting like power zones.
Strongly prefer the interval summary labels (power, time, zone, etc) in the data overlay vs a separate table. The mouse over plot highlight when you’re in the TR table helps, but IMO is just less intuitive than how intervals.icu presents the data.
Repeat from other posts, but prefer to have other activity type tracking in single calendar
Prefer the more traditional summary fitness/form/fatigue tracking vs the TR career TSS bar graph.
None of these are big enough discriminators that I’ll exclusively or even regularly use intervals.icu over TR’s analytics. Since there is a free tier I’ll occasionally glance at it. Others may feel more strongly.
I personally don’t mind that TR doesn’t have all the analytics of something like intervals.icu or training peaks. Heck, I even use my own performance management chart I programmed for fun in python/Django. There is a plethora of free and paid options that I don’t know how TR would add value besides being a one stop shop but having so many metrics introduces the risk of analysis paralysis, sometimes more analysis isn’t better.
Not strictly outside, but better device recording support, visualization, and FIT file. For example: if a power device is capable of left / right power balance, etc., then the TR app should capture this information. If a FIT file is passed to TR with this information, TR shouldn’t modify the FIT file at all. And the to be updated TR analytics could allow people to both look at the left / right balance across a ride / workout, as well as see the summary for the entire ride.
Plus other devices (e.g., Core temperature monitor) written into the FIT file.
I understand that TR today doesn’t see any value in these metrics, but:
If it’s available, it should be captured. Plus people paid $$ for devices that can produce these metrics, so there is a perception they have value
Eliminate the need for people to dual record workouts, because TR doesn’t capture info
Without having this data, it isn’t possible to figure out if it is / could be useful
