I’ve been using trainerroad for a couple of months now and love it. I’m on a criterium plan in preparation for my second season of velodrome racing and first season of crit racing next year.
Something I learned last year while track racing is that I’m pretty good (relative to my category) at sprinty type events but not great at longer endurance type events. So far this seems to be reflected in my progression levels.
I’m happy being able to bang out a good sprint, but I’d really like to improve my endurance as well. When training it seems like whenever I have a v02 max session I hop up in my progression levels by a lot but only get tiny improvements for threshold or sweet spot sessions.
At the end of my threshold or sweet spot sessions I normally have enough energy to end with a sprint (or as much of a sprint as I can do seated on rollers), so I know the sessions aren’t too much even when they’re hard. Is the answer to try to hold over the target power for the session? Or is the answer “this is just how it goes and it will take a long time to incrementally improve your endurance”?
Tbh I’m fine if it’s just an incremental over time thing, that’s how everything is, just curious if there’s anything I can do to improve my endurance improvements
at quick glance, if you’re only doing hour rides under low volume, there’s only so much room for movement with sweet spot, if you add 90-120min workouts and can add more progression. my opinion based on the screenshots is this isn’t a great “base” plan, like I could (and have) whipped up a nice sweet spot progression for some time crunched friends that would get them to 90mins of sweet spot work in a session in 6 weeks
If you want better endurance, you’ll have to train your endurance. Your PL are very low in endurance and sustained power indicating you’re not spending time in the training zones you’re looking to improve.
For reference, I’m just coming from my off season and my serious training for 2024 hasn’t even started, yet my PL look like this:
As far as duration, I’m time constraints during the week, but on Sundays I do an hour and a half. I didn’t notice that both of my screenshots were of Tuesday Thursday workouts. E.g. today I have an hour and a half threshold:
I scrolled ahead in my plan (I used plan builder to make my plan for me btw), and all of my Sundays outside of recovery and short power builds are threshold workouts. So that would be 90 mins of threshold a week, should that be enough?
Also I feel like I should clarify that when I say I want to improve my endurance, I mean endurance relative to track racing. I’m never going to be doing multi hour road races. Endurance on the track side are like 40~60 lap points races on the track. Nothing that runs more than a half hour, but endurance relative to the sprint events that are like 5 to 6 high power laps. I guess that said, the crit races will be more around 45 to 60 mins of racing. But regardless, I realized that endurance for track is different than endurance for road and I figure that may make a difference.
Because it has nothing to do with what you can potentially do, just what you have done.
Also, PLs are not equal in each category, it is pretty typical for VO2 and Sweetspot to be higher than threshold but it depends what plan you are on and the workouts you do.
I think the answer here will be to gradually build up that endurance over time, as you said in your post.
It takes time to strengthen your endurance, so keep at it! Your zones under VO2 Max will start to catch up, especially during this time of the year when you’ll be focused on more of those sub-VO2 types of workouts.
If your workouts feel too easy and you let Adaptive Training know that in your Post-Workout Surveys, AT will adjust your workouts according to that feedback to serve you more appropriately challenging workouts for your current fitness levels.
Hope this info helps! Feel free to let us know if you have any additional questions.
