How to reconcile Xert recommendations

Hey folks - I’m looking to use the workout advisor much more heavily this year, but having trouble reconciling differing parts of the recommendation. As an example, here’s what I’m seeing today:

XertRecommendation

In case the picture doesn’t post write, here’s the text:

Training Deficit: 8 XSS
Phase: Base
Estimated Training Needed: 0.1 hours / 0.1 activities
Focus Type: Endurance (Focus: 02:53:47 | Interval Targets: 277W)
Workout Goal: 127 XSS (+119 XSS Training Surplus)
Difficulty Rating: 4 stars

So I see that today is an optional workout as I’m pretty much dead on my surplus/deficit, but I do want to ride so looking to the recommendation. It leads me to “Endurance Focus” with 127 XSS, which is about a 2 hour spin at LTP, totally doable. That said, the “Difficulty Rating” is 4 stars, which is a very hard workout, no where close to the Focus Type recommendation.

Any sense for how to square this? Thanks!

You probably have a 4-5 star Training Status, would that be correct? What the system is doing is guiding you to keep that high training load with 4 star workouts, which would be ‘average’ for you. But if on Wednesdays you don’t typically train for long, it could try to squeeze in something of greater XSS/hr to achieve this. Does description (under “advice”) say that this training is optional, because you don’t have much of a deficit? If it’s optional, you could do an easy ride to help keep your Training Load up, or not.

Thanks for the response Jamie, yes, I’m a touch over 4 stars (training load of 124.1). I think I’ve been misreading the “Difficulty Rating”, in that I thought it was the “Rating” (for example “Rating: 2.5 - Moderate” for my last workout), but are you saying that suggested “Difficulty Rating” is actually the XSS load for the desired workout? That would make much more sense to me now - I can definitely find an Endurance ride to get ~120 XSS, but I couldn’t find one that said “Rating: 4 - Tough”.