Hi,
I’m trying to configure XFAI for my event on June 20, but I don’t fully understand what the individual values mean. To be honest, I find the setup a bit confusing.
Here is my configuration. As shown, when Auto-calculate Readiness is enabled, it gives me a value of 1.8 along with the message: “Your goal is within the typical range of achievability. Forecast AI will likely be able to generate a suitable plan.”
However, when I actually try to generate the plan, I get a message saying that the plan cannot be generated.
So my question is: how should I set up Xert correctly, and is it actually possible for Xert to prepare me for this event?
Thanks, but I already tried lowering Recovery Demands to the minimum and I’m still getting the same result, so that doesn’t seem to be the limiting factor in my case.
Each of the magenta outlined matchsticks on the forecast chart indicates a broken constraint. Your chart displays lots of them. It needs to be none for a successful forecast.
Hover over (or tap) on each of those matchsticks to display the warning text. What does it say?
A fail-to-forecast result is likely a combination of schedule (availability), max weekly hours, and current TL, against the number of weeks until your event (10).
What happens when you set Recovery Demands to normal (mid-point), uncheck Auto-calculate Readiness and increase the value a bit (less ready), and/or try forecasting with higher max hours/week? Sometimes a minor tweak is what’s needed to pass muster.
After I disabled automatic readiness and set it manually to Good, the plan could finally be generated.
However, I still find the behavior quite confusing from a user perspective.
Forecast AI initially suggests that the selected goal/readiness is achievable, but then it may either fail to generate a plan or generate one that still ends with “event readiness not reached” and “not enough high training load.”
So I’m not sure how the displayed readiness should be interpreted. Does it mean that my current fitness is already in the general range required for the event, while a successful forecast still depends on building more training load?
I also have Flex enabled for training hours, so I would expect Forecast AI to have more freedom in how it distributes training across the available time.
Another point that confuses me is that in some forecast scenarios the projected training loads seem to decrease during preparation. For example, I can see cases where Low and High training load are lower rather than higher by the end of the forecast. Is that expected behavior when preparing for an event?
Another question is about the expected focus for this event type.For a race of roughly 105 km with 1200 m of climbing, what focus would you normally expect to match the demands of the event?
When I choose Road Race and Hilly, Xert suggests Puncher. Is Puncher really the intended focus for this type of event? For a race like this, I would have expected the demands to align more with something like Rouleur / Breakaway Specialist / GC Specialist.
We estimate what’s possible based on your current/target training loads and the time to achieve the targeted increase. We can’t know for certain what’s possible or not until Xert actually tries to put all the training in your planner (e.g. when you run “Run Forecast AI”).
It depends on the event. If you don’t need to be prepared for a ton of sprinting, then letting your Peak Training Load decline a bit might be okay.. same with High. We do try to prevent Low training load (and Threshold Power) from declining whenever possible.
Depends on how you ride/race it… If you’re doing a lot of big sprints & attacks throughout the event, Puncheur could be a great choice. If you’re mostly sitting in and there aren’t many hard attacks that split the group, then GC Specialist might be okay.
If you’ve done the event before, you could use Race AI with your previous event and Xert will calculate the Focus/Specificity based on how you raced it last year (and you can scale the target speed up a bit, if you want).
