In my head, WLV2 for unstructured rides is not about picking workouts but about enabling you to see the impact of your outdoor rides on you. Whether that’s expressed as workout levels or something else is kinda secondary to the importance of seeing the impact.
Sad to hear no progress on that. I’m assuming no progress for custom workouts (they still have incorrect levels) either. I’m not in the beta (and have no desire to be) but it sounds like TR is moving more and more towards an unexplainable black box model. Maybe that’s their core audience
Why do you need it to update though? If you’re not doing TR workouts then the WL has no relevance. If you are doing TR workouts then both the Plan and Train Now will give you an appropriate workout based on the riding you’ve been doing regardless of what your WL is showing as.
To my mind the new system is reflecting the impact of ‘unstructured’ rides by using the data to modify future workout levels including a prediction of how difficult it expects you to find future planned workouts plus it will update the predicted aiftp. This should tell you everything you need to know about an unstructured ride and it’s likely impact on your future performance against any planned training you have in the Trainerroad calendar.
All in all I think this is a very neat solution and Ilmo re helpful than WLv2. In particular I love the transparency the workout difficulty prediction gives as it becomes very evident any time a divergence is reported between how hard you find a workout compared to how hard Trainerroad expects it to be.
I was a big complainer about WLV2 taking about 4 years to come out. I think the new AI update is way better than what WLV2 was described to be. The only value in assigning WLs to outdoor workouts was to better guide the TR workout selection so that you could mix unstructured and structured training more optimally.
I agree that the new system is a big step forward toward WLV2, but I’d like to better understand how the system is evaluating rides/workouts that are not TR workouts. I’ve played with it a bit and it will “score” a workout when there is a TR workout associated with it. But if the system considers the TR workout to be “failed”, there won’t be any scoring. I assume it’s still evaluating the workout in the background, but I’d love to hear the details on that from the TR team. Is the scoring just a nice visual for the user? How smart is the system in recognizing different types of efforts and suggesting future progression?
The way I’ve used the system in the past is associating a TR workout with a ride I did outside when that ride included those intervals. But I never actually download/executed the outside workout on my Garmin, I just did the intervals. TR advised against this approach, but it always worked well for me. I’d like to know if there is any value/reason for me to keep associating my outside work with TR workouts going forward. I don’t really care about the scoring, but I would like the system to keep progressing me properly for my intervals. Is it smart enough to do that when I don’t associated my ride with the TR workout that includes the intervals or would I be better served to keep associating TR workouts? I guess the core question is does the TR system take any guidance from what the associated workout or can it simply look at the work performed and come up with the same conclusion whether there was a workout associated or not.
From what TR employees have said, outdoor activities are never supposed to trigger a workout failed / cut short message, but there is a bug that does cause that to occur right now. It’s a display only bug. Link here, but you have to be in the beta to see it.
I wasn’t getting a “cut short”, but seeing a failure when I associated a surgy hard ride with a steady TR endurance workout. Maybe the same bug, maybe working as intended? I assumed it was just because it saw that I didn’t match the workout at all. \
By associating the same unstructured ride with multiple different “flavored” TR workouts, I was trying to see if the assigned TR workout is influencing the scoring of a ride . Maybe I’ll play with it some more.
But I don’t think that answers the real question of how smart the TR system is at evaluating non-tr workouts or whether there is any value to associating them. From what I understand, the scoring is mostly just eye candy these days and doesn’t really represent how the system is looking at the ride (but I might be wrong on that). In my opinion, it’s really difficult to identify expected adaptations by looking at a workout file when you don’t have the context of the planned workout, but it seems they are doing it at some level. I’d just like to better understand the approach and whether there is any value doing the assignment going forward.
