Training Progression with Disaster

I’ve been eyeing Disaster for some time now and I’ve always viewed it as a bucket-list workout that I wanted to be able to achieve.

Yesterday I finally did Disaster, and it’s definitely a doozy.

I was trying to understand some of the progression levels associated with the workouts.

  1. Disaster doesn’t seem to have any effect on progression levels. it seems like it should at least improve your endurance profile. It’s a 4 hour ride, and a hard one at that. Wouldn’t that have some effect on Endurance? I realize that it may not target any one particular progression level but it seems odd to imply no effect on at least one progression level.

  2. When prompted for the Workout RPE response, I entered “Very Hard” because, well, it was very hard. However, now the response on the post-workout page says “Too Intense” but I don’t understand why. Isn’t supposed to be hard? Heck, the thing is named Disaster.

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  • Short answer is that there are no PL associations. This is not a workout they recommend doing and have not taken the time to run it through the PL setup like their other planned workouts.

  • In the future, whenever we finally get the updated Workout Levels Version 2.0, this would be evaluated like any other outside / non-TR workout. Until then, we get no PL for this workout.

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I’ve often had the same reaction to the post-workout surveys. Some workouts are meant to be very hard and answering the survey with that shouldn’t be detrimental to your progression levels. I think if you succesfully complete a workout you should get credit for it in your PLs (and I think you do), but having the survey response “Very Hard” trigger an additional question is a bit misleading.

@mcneese.chad nailed it as always!

We don’t recommend doing Disaster or Disaster-esque workouts as a part of one’s regular training, so we didn’t assign it a Workout Level. It’s also difficult to categorize it given that it targets so many zones, which is why the workout doesn’t have a zone label either.

We like to think of it more as a “challenge” and less as a workout that will help you get faster.

That said, it will still be taken into consideration for your AI FTP Detection!

Because this workout is an edge case in the TR Workout library, the result of the post-workout survey is a bit funky. I wouldn’t worry too much about the fact that it says “Too Intense” in this instance.

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