July 7 I will cycle l’Etape du Tour 2024. A 4,600 metres of positive ascent spread over the 138-kilometre route. 4 “hills” of around D+1000m btw 10-20 km long each. I will spend most of my time climbing for a long time (>1 hour).
Question for the pros:
• Should I set my focus as Triathlete or climber (even if the 10 min efforts will be useless in these climbings)
• In the “Program” tab should I select pure/polar/ or mixed? (I did polar)
• If I set focus Triathlete I won’t get any polarized training. Is this correct?
• Finally, how would you set up your training (lots of endurance to increase LTP or high intensity to boost TP?) (I’m opting for LTP boost)
Have you done this event before? If so, did you analyze the ride/activity in Xert? If so, we could use the analysis of that activity to help set up a ForecastAI training program.
To answer your questions using the 120 Day Target Event Date Training program:
I would always recommend rounding down & selecting a lower focus type/athlete type, even if you’re looking to boost your multi-hour endurance. In your case, I would recommend selecting Climber (10 min power) athlete type.
For specificity, I would select polar, which means that the system will emphasize your Threshold, rather than your HIE/peak power.
If you’re training polarized, the idea is to combine both approaches… high intensity sessions will provide a strong stimulus to ‘pull’ your threshold up, while consistent sub-LTP intervals can be used to help ‘push’ your threshold up.
Looks like many of your ~150+ km rides are rated as Polar or Mixed Climber focus, so I think that’s a fair target.
Looks like you’ve set availabilities in the planner - good! For a very large event like this, it might be better if you can find time to train one additional day each week. It would help increase your event readiness score.
Would love to add an additional day but I’m doing crossfit the other days. Tuesday is the only rest day of the week and generally, I really need that day off from workouts.
I will do 550km ride in a couple of months plus Vosges (hill/climb) training camp also. A couple of races here and there. My objective is to finish the Etape (20% generally don’t finish). I guess I should be ready by then. Father of two and full time job with plenty of trips - not easy !
Anyway - thank you Scott and team. Xert is revolutionary imho. Keep on with the excellent work!
Hi @ManofSteele, can you also give some advice on my event? It is a little bit the same. 185km and 3800meters of climbing. With most climbs between 15-20min (not the real long alpe climbs, but shorter climbs in the Vosges).
I already have lots of expierence in these events but I want to use Xert to prepare myself this year (event in May). I switched between XATA and AI forecast but not yet sure what too choose?
Like Miguel, I also selected focus on 20min, but maybe it is better to go for the Climber (10min). With a polar specifity? Can I generate my training plan and can you look at this?
What I try to achieve is to be able to go around TP on the climbs as much as possible. So durability and stamina is important I guess? But how do you select your training program for this?
Hi @Stino77 , good question! Do you have any similar long ride(s) in your Xert activity history? We can analyze those rides to give us some targets to work towards. If not, then we can use some generalized values that should still help you complete your event!
I’d be curious what the Target Training Load(s) would look like for Mixed Sprint TT’ist and Polar Climber. They might actually be quite close (but that’s my speculation, they could be quite a bit different). I can certainly take a look at what’s been generated so far - send me a PM with what you’ve tried so far and I’ll take a look.
Training Load! When it comes to big rides/events, I suspect that athletes with higher overall training load will have more durability. In fact, this is captured by the Event Readiness metric!
