4 zones
Boring
Enjoyable
Kinda uncomfortable
WTF
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Rule #1 in life (and programming IMO): The only things that are easy are things on someone else’s task list
I get it, we look at this stuff and think it should be straightforward and simple, but the reality far too often is that easy is a myth. -
To that end, we have seen many, many examples of people linking their outside “Z2 / Endurance” rides with TR endurance workouts set for outside that are not Z2 rides. People with notable kicks in power for stuff like hills, lights and group ride dynamics to name a few. Then people veering well away from the general power targets and overall workout goals of the intended workouts. IMO, those would be problematic to actually assess and assign even if the goal followed was to limit around Endurance as you suggest.
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For those that can actually execute an outside workout around Endurance already, I would question why they aren’t already using the existing TR outside workout function for that.
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And considering the dissent we see with many people questioning the value of PL’s related to Endurance in the first place, I hardly see this a a clear win as a stopgap / pacifier while we wait for the full WLV2 release.
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I think that some people tend to equate WLV2 with the tools that simply identify the number of minutes in zone and wonder “if other companies can do it, why can’t TR tell me how many minutes I spent in each zone?” I do find that info valuable, and I do wish TR provided it, but I don’t think that’s at all what they are trying to do (or should do) with WLV2 since the whole point is to update PLs, which is a totally different, and far more complicated, pursuit.
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I have a similar saying, “Everything is easy if you’re not the one who has to do it.” However, I never said it would be “easy”; I said it would have to be the easiest. One of the reasons it would seem to be the easiest is simply that results of being off a bit on the PLs for zone 2 endurance is not nearly big a deal as being off on PLs for say vo2. The acceptable margin for ML error would seem to be greater for endurance.
As for why I don’t do the prescribed workouts outdoors for zone 2, I don’t want to have arbitrarily alternating power levels come up in my zone 2 workouts. It’s a challenge enough riding zone 2 without alternating power dips and rises. I could make my own custom zone 2 workouts. I just learned how to do that last week, so perhaps I will. But my non-programmer belief is that if WLV2 is currently out of reach for zone 2, there’s not much hope for the rest of it ever.
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I don’t think anyone said Z2 analysis is out of reach. I do believe that the frequent variability present in most people’s Z2 ride’s I’ve seen shared make it a more difficulty proposition than any of us might like.
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I believe that includes TR since I doubt they like the black eye present from failing to deliver WLV2 a full 3+ years after they mentioned it as a goal.
- TR added a bunch of workouts with longer intervals and lesser deltas between them that may be worth a look. Add in the fact that they use a range for those workouts when pushed to a head unit, and there is a looser rein at hand there that I think work well enough without the need for custom workouts. But those custom workouts are fine too, if you want to take that on.
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Yeah, definitely not as simple as time in zone if you are trying to identify adaptations. And Z2 might be simpler to ID compared to some of the other zones (when it’s actually somewhat steady/extended Z2), but still not simple. For all training zones, I think the approach would be building an engine that can identify intervals within a ride that are meaningful/productive and balancing those with what is happening between those identified intervals. I think that second part is where it gets complicated. A zone like vo2max seems particularly challenging where productive intervals can look a lot like unproductive ones depending on what’s going on around them. There is likely very little adaptation happening from doing a bunch of 30 second vo2 max “intervals” when they are happening randomly during a 3 hour ride. But if you do those same intervals back to back with 30 seconds rest between them, it becomes a productive workout. For 5+ minute v02max intervals, what happens between them is much less important, so each case has to be considered in the engine (and there are basically endless variations people can do in an unstructured ride).
From my perspective, it would be valuable to start with an engine that sets a high bar for what you get credit for (which could greatly simplify the engine). It has to be a clear interval or series of intervals. You can give people a rough idea of what the engine is looking for to identify the intervals so they can tailor their training to allow the engine to see the work. But I also recognize that an approach like that (which still requires some structure) would probably be poorly received by many (if not most) riders. I’m guessing that a lot of people just want to do their group ride and get adaptations for their hard effort. That would be great (if the adaptations are really happening), but I’d personally be happy with a phase 1 where it still needs to be somewhat structured for the engine to pick it up. I spent many years in the enterprise software space and it’s always hard to know when to release a new animal out into the wild. People are going to poke holes in it regardless of how good it is, but at some point you have to release something and then start picking up the pieces. I hope they are getting close to that point.
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I may be in a minority, but I’d be happy to adapt most of my outdoor rides to fit what the engine needs to see as productive work. If I had those cues, I’d start picking routes to fit. That’s what I do with zone 2. I’d have no problem doing it with the other zones.
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@BrianSpang to further corroborate Chad’s point:
In both cases, steady part is Z2 at 75%, and sprint is 10sec at 300% of FTP. Even in official TR workout library, there are similar cases (eg Boarstone +1). Those that do not have such bug, are probably manually fixed.
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How is that different from just picking a TR workout and doing it outside?
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As the weather gets better, I will be doing that. I don’t like to do interval work when it’s cold because the sweat-then-freeze component.
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Perhaps I am not understanding what you are getting at here, but TR does provide time in zone information in the ride details screen when you click into it… here is an example from a recovery spin I did in Z this morning.
Is there something more you would be looking for??
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You win! Thanks.
Thanks, I just learned something 
Why don’t you just add an Endurance ride to your calendar and then go do it outside? Then you could get the PL adaptation you’re looking for.
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I was going to point that out but choose to avoid it.
Thought it might open a can of worms 
Flagging the scheduled workout as “outside” is the work-around I currently use. But I don’t actually load the workout on my garmin, I just mentally note the intervals (or write them on my top tube if complicated) and execute those intervals at some point during the ride. The ride is typically much longer than the interval portion and sometimes the intervals need slight adjustment based on terrain or traffic, etc.
That works fine for some type of intervals, but not so well for others where I’d like some flexibility on the road to make adjustments. Sometimes that means finding a workout that’s a better fit and swapping it out before I upload the ride I just did.
It kind of works, but it’s a hack/pain trying to line up workouts with actual work. If TR could just recognize obvious intervals and determine adaptations based on them, that would be a big step forward for the way I use the platform. Assigning “credit” for all the non-intervals feels like squishy dart-throwing to me. I’m not saying there isn’t any training value or that it should be ignored forever, just hoping they aren’t in analysis paralysis trying to account for every situation.
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Oh, I totally agree. I was just replying to the specific comment.
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You’re right, I could do that, and sometimes have. But you may be onto something bigger … perhaps we don’t really need WLV2 at all
Let’s just gamify group rides. They get there own progress level.
My group rides are a mess of short vo2/anaerobic efforts and lots of z2 and recovery. It really is just a mess as 20% is vo2 power levels but not really any functional interval length.
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