I live in town of 30,000 with a small, but tight-knit cycling and triathlon community. We have a varied race season including a sprint triathlon and several time trials and road races.
I want Trainer Road to be a successful company and to continue adding users, but I don’t really want to encourage my friends to use it as presently, while they are maybe mindlessly spinning for an hour, I am doing structured sweet-spot and VO2 Max work in the hopes of moving up this season
A lot of the fastest people I know already use TrainerRoad, to some extent or another. Pretty much everyone else I know is happy doing what they’re doing, and they don’t really care that my workouts have pretty graphs on Strava. Then again, I had a lot of issues in 2017 and 2018 being consistent enough with my TR workouts to see big gains, so it’s not like people are looking at me and saying “wow, I need to do what they are doing!”
I did show it to some back in 2015 when I had to use my laptop instead of my phone. “Oh, that’s like computrainer” was the response from some. No, not exactly.
Share the love, man. I’m trainer app polyamorous and tell everyone about all of them, and even made a comparison matrix across 7-8 different training apps.
I use TrainerRoad, Rouvy, ZWIFT, and BKOOL, or some days I just use my Wahoo Elemnt and Kickr or rollers with no structure… I mainly use TR or Rouvy for my weekly interval training and Rouvy for weekend indoor virtual endurance or free sweet spot rides. It’s a nice reprieve from blue intervals and graphs to have some high def synchronized video to a ride in the alps, Italy, or even my own virtual local rides with video. I even have my own video route on Rouvy on a velodrome that I use to do lap sprints.
I try and get all my cycling friends on TR. There’s a low take up rate though. A lot of them do Zwift and club group rides and have a good weekly mileage but are nowhere near as fast as me.
I think they just don’t have the focus to “do it properly”. I’m data obsessed and listen to podcasts and read books on this stuff so for me TR is a tried and tested way to get faster.
I hear ya. I stay away from ZWIFT as much as possible. I can’t trust myself in the app, because once I get in with the group, my race brain takes over and I lose all self control, all my structure and it disrupts my plans. Consequently, I’m probably considered someone anti-social by my team, but I am very confident that doing race efforts now, not even at the turn of the year, will absolutely not make me any faster for my first race end of May. It would serve no purpose except to get an adrenaline rush. Doing race efforts is the furthest thing from my mind right now. Now’s the time to reset, go back to basics, work on cadence, leg speed, go to the gym, re-tweak my nutrition strategy, do some more research and reading, work on my bike fit etc,
Hmm, good advice. I’m doing a little too much Zwift racing at the moment and probably heading for being a January hero i think…
Time to get back to base.
If someone wants to listen or asks what I do I tell them. If it can help someone avoid all the mistakes I’ve made I’m all for cluing them in. Personally, I want more people to race and ride bikes in general. TR is still a self coached platform however, so we are our worst enemy. Knowing what works or what fails can be tricky. Thinking you know what works or fails is where the problems start (for me at least).