Hi, like many other users, I’d like to combine a TR training plan with a regular saturday group ride. The group ride is typically hard (for me), but unstructured.
I’m aware that plan builder allows me to swap a hard interval session for a group ride. However, this leads to my plan to never have a specific type of workout (eg in base, I would never do a threshold workout). This seems undesirable.
Ideally, plan builder would be clever enough to work around this, and schedule my threshold sessions on a different day of the week, but this does not seem to be the case.
What do people normally do here? Do you swap Tue and Sat workouts? (or Sat and Th?) Do you just leave the plan as is, and just move around each week? Do you do a master’s plan, and just move the two hard intervals to Tu-Th?
I understand that it would be more beneficial for me not to do the group rides (or at least not regularly), but it’s something I don’t want to give up at this time.
To make the discussion specific: let’s say I’m interested in doing a, non-masters, low-volume plan (so, three times a week).
Thanks for the reply. If possible, I’d like a solution to this scheduling problem that “just works”, and is not tied to a specific training phase or goal.
It’s not really a scheduling problem, is it? It’s an “I want to have regular but totally unperiodised and unstructured fun, and somehow incorporate it into a periodised and structured training plan” problem.
Not saying that’s a bad thing. Sounds great! But it’s going to eat into your energy, recovery and glycogen budgets without necessarily producing tangible results.
But if keeping that group ride in there keeps you motivated and you can smash your other workouts, who’s to say you won’t make as good or better progress than you would have otherwise?
Hopefully, someone else will have a more specific answer as to if/how TR can decide for you which workout to sacrifice for the group ride. I have no idea.
When setting up (or modifying) your plsn, what if you just schedule the group ride for Saturdays (put in an estimated duration), and put your intervals on Wednesdays and Sundays, with endurance rides on any other days you want to train? The AI should be able to work around that.
I never really figured out what was the best or “proper” way to include unstructured rides or what affect they had on the plan. I’d do things like change a scheduled workout to one that had an IF and TSS more like my outdoor ride, then change that workout to a Solo Ride, or Group Ride. I don’t know what that accomplished.
I kinda think all that and RL/GL etc was wack. Anyway, I have high hopes for the new TR AI rev that’s due out imminently. It does sound like I’ll be able to do plan workouts and/or just do unstructured outdoor rides as I feel like and it’ll include all that and adjust the plan and recommendations appropriately going forward. That’s what I was hoping for when I first started TR AI, but it wasn’t yet that.
Thanks. Yes, I’ve thought about doing Masters and then moving the Sat session to Th (or to Tu, and swapping). I’m wondering what others have done successfully, and/or what the TR staff recommends here.
Interesting question. But, when setting up a plan you don’t actually specify which type of interval session you will do. It’s just ‘Hard Intervals’. So, if it were me, if your Saturday group ride is generally a hard one, I would just put in Hard Intervals on two of the other days, with Endurance on all other days, and specify the amount of time you have for each one. From there, I’d then let TR’s AI figure out which types of intervals you would do on each of those days. It might be (or at least feel) at little dodgy at first, but I’m thinking it would ‘learn’ after a bit and give you the workouts you need.
And the ‘sacrifice’ is the group ride itself, not the workout it replaces, as it will invariably have too high a dose of training stress that you need to recover from in time for the next quality session.
Pick the workouts you most want to do indoors, and the other will be your third hard day of the week set aside for the group ride. Easy
Hey @jarkjarks I am not able to find your TR account, so I will make a suggestion without having looked at your training history, haha.
If the Saturday Group Ride is non-negotiable, for a low-volume plan, I would recommend changing it to a Masters Plan (2 intervals + 1 Endurance ride) and switching the Endurance ride to a Group Ride.
This way, you don’t have to think about which session to sacrifice on each Phase and the Group Ride workout card will have instructions on how to tackle the ride (if possible).
Ideally, your schedule would look like this:
Monday: OFF
Tuesday: Hard Intervals (TR Workout)
Wednesday: OFF
Thursday: Hard Intervals (TR Workout)
Friday: OFF
Saturday: Endurance Workout swapped to be a Group Ride
Sunday: OFF
This summer I had a similar situation with group rides and training schedule. I was on a 3-5 day a week plan depending on race. Mondays were my hard day/long day as I had it off work so depending on training block I was in I would do the prescribed intervals on trainer and then go outside for a few more hours to get more time in or work on skills. Tuesday I would typically be given a yellow day as a result (normally would be a day off TR or Z2 anyway) but that was when the group ride was so I’d ride the group ride (race pace) and take Wednesday (red day) completely off bike and then Thursday-Sunday I’d be back to normal prescribed intervals. It did take me a while to figure out the scheduling so TR didn’t bin my hard intervals and give me Z2 but I found once I got the calendar set up the way I actually did things, TR responded well. I would consider programming the group rides into the calendar and place your hard interval days of week on days where you will be able to devote the proper resources to them.
