Recently did a 55 mile race with about 10 miles of gravel in a Cat 1/2/3 field. I’m a newer Cat 3. We averaged about 26 mph for the full race. Very hard race with constant surging. I finished 5th out of roughly 50 riders.
What surprised me was that TrainerRoad didn’t give me a yellow day at all afterward.
I understand I tapered a bit leading into the race, and that the average power for the race wasn’t especially high. But there were 81 surges over 400 W, so it was definitely not an easy day.
Garmin suggested 95 hours of recovery after the race. Meanwhile, if I do a steady 3 to 4 hour endurance ride at about 65 to 75%, TrainerRoad will often give me a yellow day afterward. This race felt much harder than those rides.
Is this just how TrainerRoad handles stochastic race efforts versus steady endurance work? Or could tapering and relatively low average power be masking the true stress of the effort?
It seems like it takes a lot for you to get a yellow day. Looking at TSS alone, it seems like this wasn’t that hard for you, but your NP was up there..
I’ll have to see if I can find out more regarding what the big weights are for fatigue detection..
I actually questioned the accuracy of my power meter that day. Although I did calibrate it beforehand, the effort definitely felt higher. Just surprised to see Garmin’s recommendation for a large amount of recovery versus TR not recommending any.
Key question: what does your body tell you? Warm up on the trainer and try an opener. Struggling to hit moderate power? Spin easy or take a recovery day. Or two. I’m old school, I seldom rely on technology to tell me what to do.
If you carried low chronic fatigue into the race and it was only a ~2 hour race, I can’t see doing anything in only 2 hours that would put you into a real hole. You may not be ready to hit an interval session the next day, but chronic fatigue should still be fairly low if you do any kind of volume in your training.
From what I’ve seen, yellow alerts closely follow traditional CTL/Stress balance metrics. These are mostly a function of chronic training stress vs. recovery, not acute (short term) training stress. It shouldn’t dramatically change day to day. If you were already sitting at a reasonably high stress balance, that race might have put you into the yellow. I suspect when you see a yellow day after a 3-4 hour ride, you didn’t taper into that ride and were carrying more stress going in.
And a 4 hour ride at .75% is going to accumulate more TSS than a 2 hour all out effort (even if your held threshold NP for those 2 hours). Not saying any of that is a true reflection of stress and how it affects you individually, but that’s how TSS works and I think yellow/red works under similar principles.
+1 on this. The alerts and metric can provide helpful guidance and sanity checks, but they should be one of many considerations. If your body needs rest, rest. If you feel up for a ride, go ride.
I find the RL/GL useful in the way it makes me pause and actually consider how my body is actually feeling. Similar to HRV and RHR. They’re usually confirming what I already know.
It’s been said many times on this forum that even though we’re using TR to guide our training we’re all still self coached. And being in tune with how your body is feeling and recovering is a big part of that
