I see that’s where AT shines if you goto hard and the structured rides are hard. Mark them accordingly then your workouts adjust and you just don’t go as hard on the “unstructured ride”
i don’t fully understand what you mean. A Z2 long ride will still accumulate a lot of fatigue and should be taken into account. If it is skipped, AT will suggest a super hard interval session because it thinks i had a couple of rest days.
AT should be renamed PAT…partially adaptive training.
My subscription expires in February and I’m considering going elsewhere. I like the idea of AT but I too do a lot of unstructured rides, most of which I don’t bother uploading to TR because AT doesn’t adapt.
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I get that but I do have AT going with a low volume plan and it’s still great. A unstructured ride for me is a long zone 2 ride with some efforts mixed in (strava glory) or a group ride. I get people want these adaptable but also if you go to hard and can’t do the structured part of your plan, maybe you shouldn’t have went to hard. At least that’s my thinking when on a group ride that is HARD. So if I fail my workout scheduled Tuesday and I failed because of a hard group ride or too long of a ride, I’m happy it’s down grading the next workouts. Then I won’t go so hard on my group ride or solo adventure.
I don’t expect TrainerRoad to be able to adapt group rides. Hope that makes sense.
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When i am going for an outdoor ride (typically zone and 2-3 hrs duration) I pick an endurance workout from the workout catalogue with a corresponding duration and export it to my Garmin edge. To be honest, i am not able to follow the power target of the workout 100% due to traffice and terrain, but i see that the AT system takes the results into consideration and updates my PL accordingly.
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I feel confident about doing that with Endurance type rides but the problem I have a lot of my outdoor rides or races involve much higher intensity stuff and I’d be less confident about associating them to a SS work out etc and having AT overcalculate my abilities in that area. I don’t really mind AT maybe overpredicting my Endurance abilities.
ok, gonna go on a mini rant here, maybe slightly misinformed, but whatever. I really don’t get all the griping about unstructured ride support. It sounds like folks want to have their cake and eat it too with regards to unstructured riding and adaptive training. With the support for outdoor workouts and more generous passing standards, there’s no good reason why a lot of rides can’t be associated with workouts in some capacity if you’re truly doing the work.
But the big question is that on unstructured rides, are folks actually doing that much work that it would continue to progress them, or would people experience level decay if they aren’t actually keeping up with progressive workouts? Again, I think with a bit of legwork, folks can associate their unstructured rides with TR workouts, but a steady diet of random rides might not actually be doing anything progressive.
Rant over
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Exactly. If I go do 2 hours of endurance outside, I just associate it with a workout that looks similar to what I did and then I get the adaption.
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The notion is that we want a training tool that would evaluate all our rides and then adapt following training sessions in light of previous rides. This might be as simple as recognizing that we’re carrying a lot more fatigue after a hard group ride with lots of Z4/Z5 or a long weekend z2/z3 ride, and recognizing the difference between the two. It would also be great if AT could recognize that you were struggling on your daily commute due to fatigue/stress/illness and adjust accordingly.
Note that TR apparently sees the value in a tool that does this, hence their continued work on this goal, and the fact that this was part of the sales pitch on AT early on - machine learning that would evaluate all your workouts and design a training program suited to you.
I’m doing my best to patiently wait and I do use the workaround of associating workouts with unstructured rides, but that’s obviously an “it’ll do” solution.
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Except as it stands AT doesn’t really adapt outside of key workouts. So I often swap easy Wed and Fri endurance workouts for longer and higher zone 2, and I’ve added endurance workouts after doing key workouts. AT doesn’t react to additional volume and has not reduced my workouts based on doing more z2. I have yet to see a case in 28 weeks of my workouts being adjusted for any additional factors other than successful completion of key workouts
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I agree with your mini rant, but I don’t think this is true. I have failed workouts and subsequent workouts have adapted to be easier. I also took a couple of weeks off the trainer after my last race of the season and it adapted to make workouts easier for me. If all you are doing is completing workouts successfully, then of course that is all you will see. However, if adding in more volume meant you couldn’t finish subsequent workouts and answered honestly in the workout survey, it would adjust for you. At least it has for me.
Honest question - how is that different than pre-AT trainerroad? It had a set training plan and didn’t change if you did a lot unstructured rides. The only difference now is that if the unstructured rides are affecting your ability to complete the workouts in the plan, it will adjust. As such, AT is greater than or equal to the previous plans with respect to unstructured rides.
Now, if you you like to do the scheduled/structured rides outside and are not getting credit for them, that is a different story. AT is less than the previous plans with respect to structured outside rides.
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Oh yeah i neglected to mention that I’ve had some AT scale back my progression level based on a couple of tougher workouts, but I’m my experience it’s all based on one’s experience in the specific energy systems as opposed to considering other rides
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I honestly hope that never happens. Xert is great the way it is.
It does bring up something I’ve thought right from the start: TR have gone about this in reverse - tackling the low hanging fruit in a way that makes the rest very difficult to get to.
Xert got it right - develop an algorithm that will classify a ride based on the amount of strain developed in the three REAL energy systems. Once you can make that assessment of a second by second power file doing the same for workouts is easy.
TR decided that classifying workouts based on how they impact a single zone was the best way to go but it’s left them with a difficult problem to solve, as evidenced by a solution be in the works since February.
I hope they can get something working as it is devaluing the product for a lot of users right now.
Mike
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Finding workouts for my outdoor rides is going to be a hard one. I live in the French Alpes and so for example in a five hour ride, i encounter a lot of long/short/steep climbs/decents.
So when these rides are ignored by AT, it will miss a bug chunk of fatigue. Not hitting the targets on the next workout will result in false data and a low quality workout. All not very useful.
When this feature arrives, i will test out TR for sure, but for now i fill my own training calendar.
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Heads up: Workout Levels assigned to custom workouts aren’t fully supported yet, but a super high priority for the development team that will go along with accounting for unstructured rides. You may get some wild classifications from those custom workouts currently, sorry for the delay while we work on making those reliable and consistent!
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Pre AT I was ‘self coached’ meaning I did what I liked and loosely followed my own plan. AT hasn’t really been beneficial in its current state.
I also do a lot of running which isn’t accounted for but that is a different story.
I suspect I’m a little of an outlier so perhaps it was never going to suit my training preferences.
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Well, maybe not. Remember that AT automatically passes all outdoor workouts unless you tell it otherwise. While you provide some context through your post-ride survey on effort, I don’t think the PL changes reflect what you actually did, only what the workout was planned to have you do.
I still cant get matched rides impact any of my PLs…I still have an End of 2.8 despite banging out 7-8.0 rides most weekends and matching to rides from the catalogue. I also keep getting ‘fail’ surveys when banging out perfect rides etc.
Not sure whats going on but frankly AT is not of much interest beyond ‘gaming the PLs’ as there simply isn’t a plan that works for me in any way regrardless, so nothing to adapt. The win for me will be when we can create a custom plan and have AT adapt as we go along.
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