Do you have TR, Zwift, or whatever you’re using to record you TR workouts linked to Garmin? If not, your GO2max (Garmin maximum O2 uptake) will deteriorate because it thinks you aren’t doing anything.
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Ha. Love it.
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Yes, I use TR and ZWIFT to record my work out and data is send to Garmin.
I shortened my TR plan to a month so coming Tuesday the first VO2max training is planned. Let’s see if that changes anything. Like I said, I feel much more fit. I also quit smoking in July so I was hoping that would make a difference which it did at first.
Maybe I pay too much attention to the Garmin data…
It seems to make the guestimate better on my computer. A nice low and stable HR will give me better results than a ride with a high unstable HR. But its all guestimate and maybe thats because I have done all the high end work 
Think of it a bit like astrology. It’s kinda fun, but not to be used as the basis for decision-making.
As long as you don’t have a big change in your anaerobic capacity, regularly hitting an all-out effort between 5 and 8 minutes when fresh and seeing what power you can produce will probably give you a good handle on where your VO2 Max is at in relative terms.
After all, what you can do with it matters much more than what the value is. Similarly with FTP. Better to have 250 watts for 70 minutes than 260 watts for 35 minutes.
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Others have said these things, but just a summary to be sure you understand. You’re not going to ever see the Garmin VO2 go up significantly (and it will even decrease) in a base phase. Garmin uses 3 buckets for their “training load”. If your goal is simply to see the Garmin VO2 number go up, it wants to see you doing some all out intervals. So, you’d do lots of really easy stuff, almost nothing in the middle, and then some really difficult heart pumping intervals.
However, you’re in the TR base phase of your training, which means either lots of long, easy stuff (more of a traditional base phase), or middle stuff (think Sweet Spot). Neither of those are conducive to raising the Garmin VO2 metric. Lots of runners and cyclists tend to drift to the middle because it allows you to train a lot and feel like you got in a good workout, but not be exhausted. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, it’s just not the approach to get your Garmin to say VO2 is increasing. It’s going to say you’re “maintaining” or “unproductive”. I hate these words because they sound like your training isn’t working when, in fact, it really just means your VO2 isn’t going up, and it should not be going up because you’re in a base phase! You can find tons of posts here, on Reddit, etc., with people who don’t understand what the Garmin is saying and who think it sucks, but it’s almost always because they don’t understand how the Garmin works and what those ugly words mean
So, you kind of have to decide if you want to follow a structured base phase or make the Garmin VO2 raise. My suggestion is to pick one or the other. I’ve tried to do both simultaneously, and it works short term, but I usually end up over cooked.
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Yes.
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