What have I done!?!?!

so normally on a friday I ride on the road with a friend of mine, but he’s off on Holiday so I thought i’d treat myself to a harder 90 minute training ride instead.

I’d planned this one out. Overnight oats 90 mins before the ride. Carb gel (which was disgusting) 60 mins in and lots of hydration. I was good to go.

Loaded up Geronimo (Threshold 4.1) as a breakthrough ride.

Man it was tough going, mostly mentally challenging sitting at 90 odd % of FTP for 10 min stints with 60 second rest between efforts. I found it really tough, but got through it.

So sitting very happy with the success I though that was it… but… adaptations!!!

Now my calendar is adapting my plans, next ride was supposed to be threshold 1.5, it’s now threshold 3.5 lol EEEEEEKKK, I was enjoying my slow progressions

bye bye legs! I’ll miss you

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Pssst……you don’t have to accept the adaptions. :wink:

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but that feels like cheating lol. I do what i’m told.

let the AI lead me toward the light

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I’m two weeks in with my indoor plan.

It’s a rude awakening with the intensity of indoor intervals after a summer of outdoor rides and workouts.

Still it’s not just physical adaptations we need to strive for, mental resilience is key.

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In all seriousness…listen to your body. Just because an AI-generated plan tells you to do certain workouts based on one other workout doesn’t mean that it is correct.

This is why I always have at least a week’s worth of my TR plan put into my TP calendar. If I do decide to accept the adaptations (which, IMO, are WAY too frequent), I still have a decent chunk of my “original” plan for reference.

Blind adherence to any plan can lead to bad results.

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Out of curiosity, which level would be a standard 2x20 100%? I’m not a TR subscriber, so I can’t tell. (Sorry OP)

Here’s 1 hour with 2x20 @ 100 FTP.

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oof that looks just as bad!
20mins at 100% would be tough, I really needed though 60 second rest breaks at 10 mins

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Wallace is 2x20-minute efforts right at FTP, but each interval is broken up with 4x30-second valleys at 90% FTP. The intervals are separated by 5 minutes of recovery. (threshold 5.5)

Nedd is 2x20-minute efforts right at FTP, but each interval is broken up with 4x30-second valleys at 80% FTP. The intervals are separated by 5 minutes of recovery. (threshold 5.5)

FTP assessment consisting of 2x20-minute intervals with only 2 minutes of rest between intervals. FTP is calculated as the average power from the two 20-minute intervals. This workout will not generate an FTP for you, you must do the calcuation yourself. (threshold 6.8)

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Just do it!

Geronimo is a weird in-between workout. It’s classified as Threshold, but you’re spending most of your time in Sweet Spot. They could have just as easily made that a Sweet Spot 8-ish PL, which is a hard-ass ride.

Anything TR could serve up at Threshold 3.5 will be much easier than what you just did. A PL 1.5 ride would be a complete waste of time.

I did it I did it lol.

I’m glad I did, was definitely a “hard-ass ride”… my ass can attest to that haha

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So it’s basically a +/- level 6. Higher levels would mean more TiZ probably. 3x15, 3x22, etc. Disregard the ones with lots of variable intervals.

This is actually a common issue that comes up somewhat often… :no_mouth:

There is some risk to loading up random “Breakthrough” workouts, but we all get curious/ambitious from time to time. :grin:

The usual lesson here is that just because you can knock out that really hard workout doesn’t mean that you should. Additionally, it doesn’t mean that you should base all of your future training on that workout either. Since you’ve completed that workout Adaptive Training is referencing that workout when considering your upcoming training schedule. In some cases, this might be good, but in others, it could be a recipe for disaster.

Luckily, you can easily remove any completed workout from your PLs, TSS, AI FTP Detection, and cycling records when you feel the need. Simply right-click on that activity and select, “Edit Workout.” From there you can choose to remove that workout from your Progression Levels which should encourage Adaptive Training to forget that you’ve completed it.

Many times we are able to push through and put in a really hard effort which is great, but similar to racing, these aren’t the types of efforts we can or should be doing week after week if sustainably getting faster is our #1 goal. This is why A races need to be at least 8 weeks apart.

I’d recommend removing this effort from your PLs and continuing on training. If your prescribed Threshold workouts don’t feel challenging enough, you could always use Workout Alternates to pick a slightly harder workout, but I’d stay away from Breakthrough workouts most of the time. :sweat_smile:

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In reality I’m with you, probably a bad thing to do, but generally I do one long ride a week on the road. The weather stopped that for that week so decided on a harder ride to keep on pace for what I’d do on the road (generally over doing it)

Sensible - probably not.

Motivational - TOTALLY

It was tough, really put my endurance to the test and it was fantastic to get to the end having done it

Wouldn’t do it again in a hurry but I’ve since been upping my other workouts to the “productive” end of the scale and feel they are now more challenging but manageable and, well, productive.

I’ll crack on for another few weeks and adapt from there

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Sounds like a good plan!

Like I said before – we all get curious/extra motivated from time to time and there’s no harm in that. :slightly_smiling_face:

96xptb
Couldn’t resist the Talking Heads/David Byrne reference lol

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I did get to the end and ask myself “how did I get here” haha

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When I started TR 2 months ago I also was figuring out what workouts I should do.
I was already trained and had a good fitness level…
In the first 3-4 weeks in my plan I did some workouts in the level 3-5 range, following the directions and asked myself, would this be hard or to soft for me??
It took me 3-4 weeks to adjust the schema to my needs…
Just finished the 2nd block and training is now spot-on, sometimes I will choose an alternative, but that is based on the feeling of the day. But for 90% I let TR schedule my trainings.

As @eddiegrinwald is also saying, be careful, listen to your body, and analyze your training accordingly.

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How do you do that? Put your TR plan into TP?

I think this is probably the best use for picking breakthrough workouts: someone who’s already well trained, familiar with structured intervals, but who’s new to TR & needs to teach it what level of workouts they can do. I would think that the sooner this is done the better.