It sounds like you have enough data in the system such that your fitness signature should be fairly accurate and stable. That means the workouts generated by Xert shouldn’t end up too easy or too difficult, so you should be able to jump right in without needing any difficulty adjustment time period or trying to force a breakthrough to reset your fitness signature.
Xert is definitely not the easiest platform to understand, and while there is a lot of documentation there are also unintuitive UI elements and lots of settings to wrap your head around. I agree it seems a bit lacking if you look at it from an endurance event perspective. The athlete type seems like it doesn’t match up to endurance activities, but don’t over think it too much. What the athlete types really control in Xert is the power magnitude + time that your interval training focuses on. But this focus is only when you are putting out power at or above your threshold power. Shorter power duration focus / athlete type = shorter more intense intervals; longer duration focus / athlete type = longer and slightly less intense intervals. For the majority of endurance activities you are operating under your threshold power, and using aerobic conditioning and high intensity intervals to raise that threshold.
So any workouts that raise your threshold power will be beneficial toward your endurance goal, regardless of athlete type focus, but won’t necessarily hit your long ride endurance goal. I saw mentioned in another forum post that Xert automatically adjusts and recommends low intensity/energy / Z2 rides or workouts of a duration that you typically ride them at. So if you consistently do a 4 hour rides, it will recommend XSS that requires 4 hours to complete for a lower threshold workout. I don’t know exactly how this works or how truthful it is, but I will give you an example from my personal experience later.
Coming from a similar training goals perspective, my personal recommendation is to set your athlete type to one of GC (8 min), Climber (10 min), or TT (20 min). But I don’t think it really matters that much which one you choose, if the training program you choose matches the actual rides that are your goals. I’m putting some example screenshots below that show how Xert changes the athlete type / focus and power goals based on using the event training program with several different criteria.
You may want to refer to the table in this page documenting the “event readiness” metric:
Here’s an event goal for a flat, 6+ hour, recreational gran fondo, w/ readiness = 3
You can see the focus is “rouleur (6 min power)”, and note the XSS numbers.
The training load and fitness signature requirements:
Here’s the same event 2 more times, but changed from flat, to hilly, to mountainous terrain. Notice the focus has changing from Rouleur, to GC, to Climber, in addition to the XSS, TL, and power/energy numbers changing.
And here’s the event again with the mountainous terrain type, but with readiness set to 2 instead of 3.
All of this is to say that I think the athlete type is more about when you need to put down power above your threshold, how long do you need to sustain it for. But for doing recreational endurance riding, you don’t really want to or need to put down extra power unless you’re climbing, and based on the event program examples above you can see the athlete type / focus changes primarily based on the terrain. In all cases, the other training numbers all scale with the activity, but remain more focused on the lower energy / power.
Back to my personal example, when I first started using the event target program at the beginning of the season, it had me starting out at 2 hour aerobic rides. By the end of the season with my fitness getting better and my rides getting longer and more difficult, it was giving me just under 300 XSS low TL for a weekly long aerobic ride which would take me 4+ hours to complete outdoors (or 3.5+ hours estimated indoors if I could bear it).
So I recommend giving the event training program a try if you haven’t already. The other programs you could try that I think fit well with endurance are Base-Build-Peak with the focus set to a longer duration (10+ min power), or the Race program where you aim to improve upon a past performance you’ve uploaded.
OK, so to cram even more screenshots into this post, here’s the base-build-peak program at 3 different power duration settings. Note that the threshold power and low TL do change a small amount between the programs, that the high and peak energy/power have very large differences.
Road sprinter (2 min power):
Rouleur (6 min power):
TT (20 min power):
Hopefully I haven’t rambled too much and been decently coherent. And hope this help at least a bit toward getting Xert to match your goals.
