Custom Training Plan Creator: Report Bugs Here. We'll take your compliments too. (Page 2)

I love this. 2 things I would enjoy seeing. 1, the ability to do more than 5 workouts in 1 discipline. 2, the ability to adjust the length of the short, medium, long workout. Personally I am a former swimmer and a 750 yard workout is barely a warm up for me so I would like to be bale to adjust the length. Maybe a way to adjust the number of hours in each discipline per week as well.

This thing rocks though, I have to admit.

Any word on the metric bug?  Also, was just wondering about some of the workouts that have both a time and a distance (ie. the swimming ones).  For instance it has me doing 1150 yards in 24 minutes - I simply cannot swim that fast - so should I shoot to do as much as I can in 24 minutes, or do the full distance regardless of how long it takes me?

Thanks!

As a coach, I typically tell my athletes to train for time. You pace is going to be variable each day - time is going to be the constant. I try to develop training plans based on time. I may offer a range of distance to complete in that time, but for me, time is key. This is unless I am having my athletes overcome mental barriers - a couple of them just got done with a 10 day training block that included a full 100 mile ride (I told them to make sure their odo showed at least 100.1) and a 5k OWS. There are mental barriers to those type of distances that need to be overcome.

Thanks! 

I can't make this happen. Has it happened to you more than once?



You can do this, on the first tab. When you select a race distance it also lets you customize the target distance for each sport. If you want to be conservative with your run, just shorten the run distance.

One workout per week for a sport won't be an option for these plans.  There isn't any real sport specific fitness to be built from one workout per week which is what the tool is designed to create.

Very interesting. It didn't have an option for iron distance, so I inputted the distances on the first screen to see what it did. I think it didn't like it, because the plan has me starting out at 4000 yd swims and building to 8000. I think that may be a bit overkill.

Yeah for fun I did the same thing and it had me with back to back 118 mile rides and my long ride of 197 miles. Not bad only 28 hrs of riding scheduled for the week. Quick, someone tell my wife I am going to be gone a lot during this training program.

The one thing that shouldn't be done is to modify the 'race distance type' distances into the half or full Iron distance - essentially a whole other distance.  If you want half or full IM plans you need to wait until we get this fully live.  The Sprint or Olympic selection (no matter what the distance) assumes you are 'in general' training for a race 'around' that distance and generates the plan accordingly.  There is a lot of math behind the scenes to customize the plan to the distance.

We hope to have the program live in a month to generate half or full IM programs...for now it should be strictly sprint or Olympic plans.  Modifying the 'distance' when you have specified the 'race type' needs to correlate reasonably to get a decent plan otherwise our assumptions will not work and you will get an unworkable plan.  So don't select the 'Olympic' race and modify the distances for a full IM until we have this totally live.

Yeah. Understand, but you can't blame us for trying. Most of us on this site are geeks in one way or another. The "lets see what happens if . . . " can be too much of a pull for most of us.

This looks like a really cool idea. I can't wait to see it out of beta.

I haven't played with the tool, but from screen shots I have gleened that you need to select a "recovery week" every 3rd or 4th week.  Forcing you to choose recovery weeks at specific intervals is perpetuating one of the more common myths about triathlon training out there, in my humble opinion.  It need not be a week long, and it need not be at a prescribed interval.  I see less and less emphasis on this type of 3:1 plan on the forums (a good thing), even if it is still the pedominant way to construct a training plan (a bad thing).

I would hope a custom tool like this would help steer beginners away from that mentality, or at least give them a choice instead of forcing them into it.  Far better, in my opinion and experience, to make more gradual volume increases so that recovery needs are not so great as to require a week of rest... but to continue with those volume increases week after week after week (maybe with a recovery day or two as needed (based on how you feel) here or there).

I had thought that culturally, the BT community (users) was beginning to embrace the consistency/repeatability theme as a training philosophy.  My suggestion would be for the plans to acknowledge that reality, or even be forward leaning.

I recant everything I've said and offer hight praise if the plans have an option which already does this.


ETA - this is not a rant against a 3:1 plan... that may very well be the best way for certain people to do it.  But imho it is definitely not the "default" way that most people should be doing it.  I get that your programming is all wrapped up in the math... but how difficult would it be to allow you to adjust the duration and frequency of the recovery period? 

If I was using this tool, I'd want to select no recovery, but then whenever I felt I needed a recovery day, use the "move" feature to bump my entire plan (going forward) back a day.  Of course I'd also want to be able to customize the % increase, preferably being able to select a different percentage in each of the 3 disciplines that was variable over time (ie backing off the % increase as my overall volume got higher).

Edited by JoshKaptur 2010-08-17 10:23 AM

The metric issue will be addressed in a future update.



This should be all set.

We have the 3:1 build:recovery as this has worked very well for people using the free plans I have created that has been offered for the last 5+ yrs.  We have added the 2:1 as Ricci is a proponent as that is how he structures most of the Silver/Gold plans.

We simply can't provide for more customization (adjusting build volume weekly increase %, duration of rest, etc) as that dramatically will add much complexity to the programming while also requiring the user to know a lot more about themselves... which especially as beginners, they don't.  Beginners need something safe, easy, proven and above all else, simple with few 'options' to adjust.   I get emails all of the time on how happy and successful people are on my free plans (3:1) or Ricci's Silver plans.

Even the more seasoned triathletes looking for gains will benefit from this tool with the Int/Adv options and detailed workouts as this was created with a lot of Ricci's current thoughts. So with this tool we are keeping the methodology on how volume is created but giving users LOTS of more flexibility such as:

• Adjusting the plans from 12-26 weeks
• Beginner, Int, Advanced
• Build or Maintenance
• 2:1 or 3:1 Build:Recovery weeks
• Drag'n Drop the workouts to the days that you can train - eliminating a lot of time redoing it after you import it (the current way)

Advances are happening all the time and it's a sure thing that the current understanding of "best practices" will be refuted by someone at some point. We're very confident that the methodology we use is effective. It will produce significant gains in fitness specific to the sports addressed.  Sure, there will be those that are very in tune with their bodies, that may do better on a different type of build:rest cycle (or none at all)...but from our experience, that is not the bulk of the users here...this tool is not to replace a personal coach, but to provide an improved but reliable program from years of experience from our current plans for the AG'er.

This is way cool. I played with it a little and created a quick plan. Here is a little feedback:

• It's freakin awesome; more useful to me than I had thought it would be
• I'm not sure what paces I should use in the paces section. I used my race paces for the distance selected.
• I'd love to specify which weeks are base/build/peak assuming these are using TTB principles to make the schedule (although reading the instructions, there may not be any 'build' period)
• I'd love to specify instead of short/med/long a % of the weekly time each workout should be, or maybe just customize what % short/med/long is.

Now, here is a problem I ran into. I've setup a plan with s/b/r of 3/3/4 and it seems to have missed one of my runs. I've got a screen capture here that shoes the plan and what it was setup with. In the grey section, it has my week as I built it with the drag-n-drop, but I'm never scheduled a run on Monday nor 4 runs a week. Also, I tried this again to see if I could reproduce it and I had the run/swim order swapped on Tue & Wed and this gave me a schedule with no workouts on Monday, so only 3 runs & 2 bikes.

I think this was mentioned earlier, but I didn't see an answer. For our paces are we supposed to input our race pace or our practice pace? I put in my race paces and it gives me all of my workouts at race pace, i.e. my run race pace is 8:00/mile and all of my training runs are set at 8:00/mile.

Again I'd like to say how awesome this is and I can't wait til it has a HIM/IM option.

noticed that while working through the tabs if I get to the preview and then go back to previous tab it pretty much resets everything and I have to start doing all of the tabs all over again.

Overall it's a good idea I would be interested to see some plans with power. Now that power is getting cheaper and can be incorporated into a beginners budget it would be nice to have a plan.

Power is already in the works. It's one of the things we're in the process of finishing up right now.

That will be so awesome, thanks for all you guys do!

I tried this for the first time today as I think ahead to training over the winter and ramping up to my first tri next spring.  It looks like a great tool with lots of flexibility.

One question which may sound dumb but...how do you save a plan?  I imported the plan into my calendar, but I did not see any option to save a plan.  Nothing gets listed in the My Plans tab.

Thanks.

That feature isn't live yet.