I’m super excited to be doing a 6 day training camp in Mallorca in a few weeks. My camp is close enough that it has now entered into the TR Training Simulation window and the projected red light / green light is pretty disheartening - already yellow on day 2, followed by red lights for the rest of the trip. I realize that it’s too late to meaningfully change anything, but I’m really wondering what I could have done differently.
Camp days are listed below. I’m assuming all of the 4 middle days will be at least 4 hours after factoring in all the climbing.
40 mi and 1,919 ft
67 mi and 4,373 ft
69 mi and 8,030 ft
61 mi and 7,100 ft
66 mi and 6,260 ft
25 mi and 1,600 ft
About me
I’ve consistently averaged a little over 7 hours per week for the past 4 years - 3 kids under 10, so there’s not much room to increase volume.
My training for all of 2026 has been excellent (thanks, AI?) and I’m regularly hitting new best power numbers. All things considered, I feel very good about my fitness level going into this.
To prepare for the camp, I’ve done 3 big blocks. Overall, I felt like my legs kept up pretty well on all of them.
9 hour weekend in January (3+3+3hr - all on trainer)
10 hour weekend in February (3+3+4hr - 1st & 3rd outside)
7 hour weekend in April (4+3hr - both outside)
I have a lighter 2 weeks planned leading into the camp to maximize freshness
If you did a block of 10 hours in three days and your legs felt good, why do you care about what AI predicts how you’ll be feeling? Besides more volume, I think what you did is perfect. Remember to pace yourself for four big days. Don’t empty the tank on day 3. Eat lots, including on the bike.
There’s not much you can do to prepare yourself for a 17.5-hour training week coming off sub-6-hour weeks.
If you want to avoid yellow and red days, you’d have to train more leading up to the camp, but that’s not always possible and sort of dilutes the point of a volume camp like this one.
It’s okay to see yellow and even some red from time to time. Just keep in mind that this type of training isn’t sustainable long-term.
Go enjoy your training camp! Rest and eat as much as possible, and ensure that you’re recovering enough afterward before getting back into your typical training.
You are going to more than double your baseline weekly volume. You don’t need machine learning to tell you it’s going to be a tiring week.
But that’s kind of the whole point of a ride camp.
The whole red light thing is not really designed to understand that this is a ride camp. Heck, it probably wasn’t even trained on much data that included ride camps.
Ignore it.
It’s not telling you anything useful or actionable. And in fact, your negative feeling about seeing these colours come up is a great example of how over quantifying sport with less than perfect indicators makes you lose sight of the forest for the trees.
Eat lots, sleep lots, have fun. Don’t let a piece of training software ruin your dream vacation.
I think you’ll be surprised how your body can respond in this situation. I did probably the same camp a couple years ago and every day was yellow/red, and every day was the best day I’d had on the bike. My 6 week TSS average going in was “only” 389 and then did over 1200 the week of the camp. You’re going to have a great time!
Sunday is the first day of camp. I didn’t mark it as an event b/c it’s an easy opening day (40mi / 1900’). It will probably be a lower TSS, but I was just using TR AI to fill in based on my estimated duration for an easy opener.
The other workouts were all TR AI suggested efforts as my block ended the prior week.
Thanks all for the quick feedback. It’s about on par with what I was expecting to hear.
I knew going in that I’d be digging a big hole and I’ll obviously do the rides regardless. Having said that, I guess I was hoping to at least see that the big blocks I had previously done would project me thru the first 2 big days before hitting red.
I did see that this is actually addressed in the TR docs, so I suppose the most important part will be handling the recovery afterwards
What if I get Rest Recommended during a stage race?
Keep going! Stage races and training camps are situations where you’re likely going to accrue a lot of training stress which will yield yellow and maybe even red days on your Calendar. Just make sure you take the time to recover properly once it’s wrapped up.
