I know a lot of coaching services will offer flat rate fees for phone call consults, I like to manage my day-to-day training through TrainerRoad because my schedule can be a little hectic but I like the idea of being able to audit my overall plan with somebody.
Looking for any thoughts and or specific recommendations for coaching services. My A race for 2025 is Leadville for what it’s worth
I’ve just had a consultation with kilowattcoaching in the UK. My plan is to have a 2 more before my event in the middle of May. The first consult consisted of a video chat where he asked me about my goals etc then I gave him access to my intervals.icu account so he could have a look at my data. 3 or 4 days later we had another chat where he gave my the outline and the reasons for 3 blocks of training for the next 3 months. I’m about to start it so i’ve no idea how effective it will be, but given its a real change to the way I’ve been doing things, it gives me quite a bit of confidence that it could be effective as its going to be a completely different stimulus to me.
Some random thoughts, and my experience: My coaching (specifically targeting Leadville the last two years) started with a consult, moved right to “full time” and hasn’t been geared around TrainerRoad workouts and we’ve done more “Block” based training, all scheduled and programmed through TrainingPeaks, even if I’m still using TR to execute the workouts.
For example, probably mostly base with lots of Sweet Spot, Tempo, and Z2 probably through the end of the year. Dedicated VO2 Block in January followed by Dedicated Threshold and Over Under Blocks before starting to really work on lengthening TTE at race pace. By summer - we’d be working on 5-6 hour weekend rides with lots of race pace intervals but doing a lot more Sweet Spot, Tempo, and Z2. Although this year I’m doing Unbound first, so we’re going to include a little more VO2 and year round strength work to see how it works.
TrainerRoad’s methodology more mixes up everything at the same time (e.g. SST, Threshold, VO2 all in the same week). I’d also recommend going and finding and reading the VO2 Max Progression Thread so you know the difference between the VO2 Training Zone and Training VO2 Max.
I think what you might run into is that while TrainerRoad and Coaches can both deliver results, you may find the scheduling and programming to be different approaches. While I’m still a TR Subscriber right now, I don’t think I’ve used a TR workout in two years?
I think it’d be valuable hearing what a coach has to say, but a lot of the benefit is in the day-to-day and week-to-week scheduling and programming and how much it can change based on how it’s going and your objective data combined with subjective performance.
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FTP 285->315 in year 1, 315->340 in year two (The previous year + was 245->285 off the couch on TR) 2023 time 9:02, 2024 time 8:42 on a slower course and day. Execution, prep, and pacing was similar and pretty spot on both years.
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How do the total hours x year compare?
I probably need to explain those gains some: I was a recreational rider up through 2021. There were periods where I did a decent amount - biking to and from work for example, but I had never trained until I started doing Zwift in the Fall / Winter of 2021, and then took my first ramp test with TR at the beginning of 2022 - that was the 245. No endurance sports in my past.
The first year from 245 → 285 was TR Low Volume - like 3-4 hours a week. But, off the couch newbie gains. Had a bout of covid, got back to where I was, then started training with my coach in January of 2023. Then probably an average of ~11-12 hours a week excluding I think 4 weeks totally off the bike in 2023, but including all my other rest/recovery weeks. 2024 has been similar except more time off this fall after Leadville. So, saw good gains in years two and three, but significantly more time on the bike than year one.
Still, I’ve really only been training less than 3 years at this point. I think I’m finding that at 47 years old I probably could have been a pretty decent endurance athlete if I’d trained or focused on it when I was younger. Haven’t found that I’ve plateaued yet - so giving it another year of the same program and seeing how it goes.
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I actually think the TR workouts are overly complex, and harder to track progress without trusting their Progression Level Algorithm.
For example - when doing sweet spot, do you really need more than 3x10@90%, 3x12, 3x15, 3x20, 1x45, etc., etc.?
Pretty easy for me to look at a sweet spot workout and then go back and compare to that exact same workout in the past. Was my heart rate response the same for the power level I did it at? What were my notes on RPE or effort? What about EF?
Short answer - I do a lot of much more simple intervals. VO2 would be 3x6, 4x5, 5x4, etc. And then, might also do 4 hours at a consistent Z2 on the trainer, 1 hour at a flat never changing recovery pace.
And, also do workouts like 2 hours of Z2 followed by Intervals at the end, or intervals at the beginning followed by an hour of Z2. And as I get closer to my events - we created some longer Leadville “Sim” workouts to match the power outputs and durations of some of the climbs on course.
Basically - many workouts are more “simple” or straight forward, but also more custom to what I was targeting. Another advantage to the coach…
An example from yesterday - with the main intervals being 3x15@90% for sweet spot work after a warm up and then 30 mins Z2.
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Thanks for sharing. I find hard to track the effectiveness of interventions due to the variable nature of proceses involved. I think what is key is to keep challenging the system in novel ways and ride the long term positive drift in fitness through consistency. That was my thinking when looking for a coach this year.
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Your coach sounds like a genius. 
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Hey there, I’ve been @BCM’s coach for the last two years. I have some opinions on TR and they’re largely positive. I doubt there are many workouts I program that aren’t in their library, though the way I train VO2max differs from their canned program stuff. There’s more to it than just 6x3 min at XXX% of FTP. Outside of that, I seriously doubt I have any workouts that they don’t cover in some way.
There are subtleties in workout execution that are different and my approach is certainly different than TRs in a lot of ways, so there is more to it than simply who has the most workouts. I would argue (and some really good high end coaches would agree) that you don’t need that many workouts to be successful. TR has to write plans that can work for thousands of people and have enough variety to keep them coming back. I think I have something like 70 workouts in my library that I modify for each athlete and I add new ideas periodically, but really how many different ways do I need to write “ride endurance for 3 hours?”
The bigger part of human coaching is doing the right things at the right times and in the right amounts for you and your specific circumstances.
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See, something like this would be pretty easy to program with TrainingPeaks and store in your library there:
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Having used both TrainingPeaks and TR’s workout creator extensively, TrainingPeaks’ version is a fair bit cleaner and more user friendly in my opinion. This isn’t a shot at TR, just my opinion. Makes sense too since without a user-friendly workout creator, TrainingPeaks is out of business. Super simple to use and the workouts translate to TR and Zwift fairly seamlessly.
One thing to note is I believe you have to be a Premium subscriber to use workout creator. I know you have to be premium to be able to plan more than like 24 hours in advance (unless you have a coach doing it for you).
There are some tricks if you know someone is going to use Zwift or TR where you can get the comments to pop up and then the cadence stuff doesn’t always work well with Zwift, so you kind of have to massage it a little bit, but it works very well.
(Does TR still support their workout creator?)
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We still support our Workout Creator for those who use it, but we don’t plan on releasing any real updates in the foreseeable future…
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Call me old school, but this overt self promotion really killed the organic flow of the thread.
I don’t know, I thought that was helpful context when his plans specifically were under discussion. 
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Same. Kurt’s long been an active member here, contributes from both coaching and athlete perspective, and goes out of his way to not self-promote. Being the coach of one of the guys talking about consulting with a coach in a consulting with a coach thread, means he can add even more pertinent info.
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I’ll also say from my perspective, the reason I ended up deciding to work with Kurt was his participation on this forum and the free advice/information he’s given to people, and I a little bit probably brought him into the thread.
Granted, I haven’t found him a total jerk or anything like that either, although I think some workouts and blocks are borderline hazing 
To be clear though, I’m still a big fan of TrainerRoad as a platform and company. I still subscribe and still recommend it to people. Working with a coach and doing the volume I’m doing now probably isn’t a forever thing for me, at some point I could see myself going back to TR, but for the time being the plan’s been working and I’ve been showing gains, so am still of the mind to see how far we can take it.
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gonna echo the sentiment that I find Kurt’s participation to be entirely tasteful and he’s been an asset to this community for a long time. as someone who has erred not to talk about my own fledgling coaching venture, I have never found Kurt to be overly self-promotional and it’s entirely appropriate for him to mention his work in this thread!
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The amount of free help Kurt has given on this forum far outweighs any self promotion.
And as far as I can tell, the only amount of self promotion he’s done is clearly stating that he is a coach. Plus, he always has positive things to say about TR and often recommends it to those not needing 1 on 1 coaching.
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He asked a question specifically about my workouts to one of my athletes. As I have experience as a former six-year TR subscriber/user as well as being the coach “in question”, I thought my response was relevant. I also don’t see at all how I “self promoted”. I’m a coach. That is not a secret here.
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