I just got a new Garmin Edge 1040. My second ride with it was a 150 mile gravel ride and I tried out the power guide feature – it was awesome. Kept me sticking to a plan and riding within my abilities and I’ve never finished a big ride with so much energy.
But over that long day I couldn’t help thinking the power guide seemed like a much more natural way to train with power than using TR workouts outdoors. When riding a TR workout I’m constantly fighting the terrain or trying to adjust as needed to find the right terrain for a set of intervals. When using a Power Guide the intervals are in distance rather than time so you always finish your VO2 max power at the top of the hill, which is what is actually natural.
So now what I’d like to do in my ideal world is build routes with the right terrain to use for various TR workouts. I guess this might really lead away from TR eventually but I could still see using the platform to tell me what I need is X minutes at Y power and then I can put together a set of hill repeats or whatever that match that but use Garmin’s power guide to execute so that rather than fighting my computer if I go faster or slower than I’d guessed I can just ride the power targets to the top of each rise and so on.
Has anyone else tried going down this route? I realize it’s a bit of a doozy, and not everyone has the number of roads to create options around them that I do, but here in rambly New England I can stitch together a wide array of routes to do just about anything except give me a long enough flat enough section to easily do a TR workout as written without a fair amount of shenanigans.
