@rkoswald - lots of mostly-coherent thoughts incoming (but no guarantees): Yeah, lots of outdoor endurance rides (aka just riding my freaking bike) have been fantastically helpful, and kill two birds with one stone: volume very concretely seems to be the biggest indicator of overall strength on the bike, and these rides are also a great time to decompress mentally. I ride them mostly on RPE (usually 3-4 for me), keep a very casual eye on HR, and barely pay attention to power while I’m riding, taking into account Totally @The_Cog 's reminders that the zones are descriptive not prescriptive. I’m still doing plenty of intensity (JOIN is ramping up my VO2 Max eight weeks out from my A race), but I’m primarily focused on just getting out on the bike and putting in the miles first. In terms of rest and recovery, I’m using volume as the gas, and RHR as the brakes.
The other big change to that equation is the mental health angle. Going out for a couple hours first thing in the morning before anyone else is up (frequently on the bike by 5AM) is just really, really nice. It’s peaceful, I get to enjoy the scenery, and since I live rurally I’ll see maybe one or two cars on the backroads/gravel where I live, if that. So the volume is a big improvement to both fitness and stress levels, and it’s a truly wonderful cycle: increasing my fitness while reducing my stress levels.
And like @toribath mentions, I’ve also been thinking a lot about open vs. closed systems in training. TR at this point is a very closed and highly-prescriptive system. It prescribes a pre-determined number of workouts each week, you feed your data back into it (aka do your workout), then it makes an adjustment and spits out a result that determines the next week for that workout slot. It also can’t account for volume or workout stress outside of that system, so in order for it to be successful TR has to constantly steer you back into the system. If you’re going to do work outside the system, it must necessarily make sure that those extra workouts aren’t going to impact your ability to do the prescribed workouts (“Zone 2 only” outdoor rides) because it doesn’t understand or care that fitness and readiness vary naturally throughout the week.
The effect on the user (or its effect on me, at least), is that it makes riders a bit myopic, sometimes to the point of wearing blinders on what kind of riding does or doesn’t benefit your fitness. But because TR is heavily focused on time-crunched athletes, the workouts are mostly intense workouts that create stress, and because they are frequently designed to be complex enough to keep you interested on the bike, they require a lot of focus, which also increases stress.
Open systems like JOIN (link to the JOIN thread here) provide a broad framework for consistent riding and ramping up volume sustainably, while giving you reminders when you’re going too hard or missing too many rides (rides! not just workouts!), so it feels like it weaves much more naturally into the process. The workouts themselves are also easy to remember: my Tuesday ride is 2 hours, 4x12 tempo with 5 minute rests in between. I’m not even going to bother loading it into my head unit, and JOIN doesn’t care where in the ride the intervals happen.
This isn’t to disparage TrainerRoad, they’ve got far and away the best UX of any training app out there and it clearly works very well for a whole lot of people. They’re also obviously aware of this and are working on solutions like WLv2, Red Light/Green Light, and others, and it sounds like they’ll get there. But I do think being open-ended is kinda table stakes for a modern training app, given apps like JOIN, Athletica, Spoked, and others are already doing it, and doing it pretty well.