It doesn’t seem to be monitoring my progress. It feels wrong that if I had skipped the planned workout, my PL would have remained the same. But because I opted for a slightly less intense workout, it dropped. The point being, I think I was in a better “sweet spot” position (PL) because I did a workout, compared to if I just decided to delete the workout because I was time crunched. But the numbers don’t reflect that.
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That shouldn’t be the case.
If you skip a workout, your PL should drop. 
Interesting. That didn’t happen earlier in my training plan, when I had deleted a workout for similar reasons. Or maybe it did and I didn’t notice it later, but I’ve been pretty vigilant about monitoring these changes. I’ll keep an eye out for that in the future, as I frequently switch/swap workouts around due to time constraints.
Same thing here. VO2 PL was at 6.1 from a 6.4 workout completed 2 weeks ago. Hand picked a 4.6 level VO2 workout to do this week as I am trying to have a hard easy week (or is it an easy hard week?)
Completed it and marked it hard (I mean its still VO2, right?), PL dropped to 4.6. Went back and changed it to moderate but that didn’t do anything.
Clarification: Skipping a workout can result in a PL drop, sometimes does not depending upon the scope of missed workouts and what you’ve completed recently. The logic behind that is complex, but comprehensively, it’s important to reiterate that the goal is not to stress your abilities to the max every day and every workout. Levels will change and fluctuate, its all part of the process! Focus primarily on the work you’re putting in the bank and how it’s helping you move towards your goals. 
working as intended? seriously, this just doesn’t make any sense. why is a recovery ride I marked as easy on a day I had no other workout scheduled on my plan (the VO2 max workout was planned by me) dropping my progression levels.
considering just ditching AT at this point, clearly it wasn’t ready for full release
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This all seems experimental to me.
Personally , I’m not overly concerned about the progression levels, and whether they fluctuate a bit. As far as I can see, mine reflect what I’ve done most of ,ie, sweetspot and threshold, with almost zero anaerobic and little vo2 max, and are around 4.5 for the sweetspot.
I do question the value of these figures, and how helpful(or not) they are to us. Having read the OP and previous posts, I can see problems ahead. Unless you completely ignore the figures, which defeats the object of monitoring our progress.
I’m wondering if it is better to view it as a more long term progression , say, monthly.
One thing I really like is the Other Chad’s effort chart.
My retro brain says, just take a photo of it , print it off and stick it on the wall above my desktop , so my lizard brain doesn’t have to think!
This is my position…as noted in another thread, I’ve been largely outside since AT launched. I got in just as I had transitioned to almost full outdoors for the year and I did not take the invite as a result. That said, I wouldn’t get too hung up on PL’s either, especially from a micro-standpoint. My understanding is that the algorithms eventually snuff all the variances out and correct over the course of the plan. Think if it like the stock market…you can obsess over the daily fluctuations, but what you are really interested in is the long-term performance.
For now, especially since I don’t have an A event for 2022 yet, I’m not interested in AT. I’ve been doing this long enough to know when I can / need to dial things up or down. Once I have a definite event next year, I’ll consider AT then. For now, I’m sticking w/ TBMV for the rest of the year and jumping outside when the weather allows (like this weekend 
)
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For what it’s worth, I have seen on occasion the graphic changing the progression level not always match with the progression level on my career page, and after being surprised, I’d check and my actual PL would be as expected.
/shrug
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Does the chart on your “career” page show the PL being 1.2? The Progression from that workout is -3.3, but I’m not sure that reflects in your PL for AT.
This is what I think happened.
You had set an endurance PL of 4.5 sometime in the past - likely > 2 weeks prior to Fletcher being completed. In the meantime your endurance PL had been slowly decreasing. However, because you hadn’t done any workouts that directly impacted your endurance PL it was still displaying as 4.5. Thus, at the time you completed Fletcher your endurance PL was some other value - likely 3.3 based on that screenshot
Thus, when you completed Fletcher, it forced a recalculation of your endurance PL and it was set to 4.1.
The flaw that I think you’ve hit upon is that PLs don’t update in real-time as they decay. They are only recalculated when you do a ride that touches on that PL (either as the primary or a secondary PL).
Therefore this appears to you as if riding Fletcher decreased your endurance PL, when really all it did was recalculate it based on what the system views as your current capabilities.
If TR recalculated all PLs on a nightly job for all users you’d likely have seen your endurance PL slowly decay in the interim from your prior 4.5 endurance level to something at 4.1 or below
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“considering just ditching AT at this point”,- already done this, the PLs and reduction in PL and ‘workout adjustments’ I ignore and just choose the PL/TSS/IF I want.
Thanks for bringing this up! Upon looking more closely at your PLs and completed rides, it looks like there’s an initial bug in that calendar ‘celebration’ display. We’ve created an issue for the team to fix it, but as you can probably see from your now correct career page: once the ride syncs (or the full app resyncs), the numbers should update correctly, so you may see this only immediately after workout completion. We’ll get going on this fix!
I’ve had the “celebration” graphic for a lower PL ride along with it showing that the difference is a + change in PL despite it being lower on a few occasions. Don’t recall any in the past few weeks, I use the beta windows app exclusively. However I’ve checked when I saw this and it never seems to have actually lowered my PL on the career page so I didn’t think much of it. I did take this screenshot one of the times since I planned to send it to support and then forgot.
I did just look at my career now though my PLs are not matching my rides, a sunday ss ride of 4.2 rated moderate but my career page is showing 3.4, I won’t muddy up this thread with that and just message support.
ETA: If I go to my calendar and look at the ride in the image above (October 6th) it shows progression as 4.5->4.5 now, not sure what it said at the time but I did check career page and it was not changed to a lower level.
@IvyAudrain, can you confirm if this is the case and if this is how it was supposed to work? On 10.24 I did an outside endurance ride associated with Gibbs 4.9 which bumped my PL the expected +.1 from the prev 4.8.
Did an endurance 2.6 on 10/26 with no change in PL, a threshold ride 10/19 (which gave an appropriate PL increase for that energy system) and an unstructure mtn bike biathlon ride 10/31. Another endurance 2.6 on 11/2, and then endurance 1.7 on 11/5, neither which saw any PL changes (btw, last week of POL BUILD looks like big time recovery workouts assigned) On 11/7 did a 4.1 endurance workout, and my PL then dropped to 4.1.
So, in two weeks following TA recommended workouts well below my endurance PL I had no changes, then a drop from 4.9 to 4.1 (which I only caught because something flashed about PLs being updated so I have no way to know what the update is – but there are other threads asking for PL history).
Big question is whether I’m seeing expected behavior, or something different.
I would check in with the team at support@trainerroad.com so they can see the full scope of your workouts in the context of PL decay, identify any potential bugs or issues, and speak better to whats going on. Sorry for any confusion, they’ll be stoked to take a look though!
AI or no AI, it is a computer “talking back to you,” not a magic coach in a box. No?
Common sense and self- adjustment of level choices on workouts still seems to be relevant.
Alas, as Voltaire said: “Common sense is not so common.”