What is the most effective way to set Xert and the Forecast AI to prep for an 8 day stage MTB race (Cape Epic)?
Anything anyone has tried previously for similar multi-day events with success?
1 Like
I would love to get some info on how to handle this as well. I like to peak for Tour of America’s Dairyland which is 11 days long. Would be great to be able to enter a whole season of racing with A, B, and C races.
For a stage event you want to arrive at your target date with the lowest possible Readiness Score based on your max hours and availability schedule.
If required disable Auto-calculate Readiness and recast with new settings.
You can also push settings past the achievable warning and see if the forecast is viable.
1 Like
Welcome @illinihand !
Great questions and one’s that are asked quite often (I think we should include these questions in a future Tech Support Video).
The key to preparing for a stage race is ensuring you have enough low, high and peak training load such that each stage doesn’t dig too big of a hole for you to handle. The best way to do this is the use an exemplary ride from your history, or upload a FIT file you are able to find, that represents either the toughest day of the stage race or an average day of the stage race. I know this isn’t an easy thing to find necessarily. If you did something similar in the past, it would help a lot since you could use that as guidance.
As @ridgerider2 points out, trying to get to the best Event Readiness is key. Generally a value between 1 and 2 is good for a stage race. If you’re unable to reach that, then you’ll simply need to do as much as you can in terms of training leading up to the event. The more trained you are, the more prepared you’ll be. You’ll just need to be aware that you’re going to be quite tired at some point during the race and may not be at your best.
With respect to A, B and C events. These are handled indirectly by Forecast AI. Your program target (goal, event, race) is your A event. Xert will try and get everything aligned towards this and will ensure you’re tapered leading into it to achieve the Event Readiness (for event or race).
B events are like High Intensity training days. Xert will balance things out so that you are not red or yellow status, i.e. very tired or tired status, before these. This is a sort of semi-taper where you want to be fresh for the event/race but you’re not wanting to take too many days off leading up to it to compromise your A event. You’re also not training specifically for it since your training is still aimed at your A event. Having said that, if the B event is still important, you may want to blend the B targets into the A targets. That is, use a focus that might be appropriate for both.
To create a B event, open the Choose Training panel for that day and pick an activity or input the XSS values that represent what will be expected during that race. Pin the activity to the calendar and adapt/”recast” the forecast. Xert should have you in blue/fresh status for the event. You could further manually fine-tune by changing the training before the event to something that is better suited as preparation, pin those activities/workouts and then recast the forecast.
C events are just like unstructured rides you do during your plan. You can just do them in place of the training that was planned or you can treat them like B events. In the case of C events, you may just leave the training plan unchanged leading up to it. Again, up to you if you want some additional freshness before the event.
Another approach is to simply daisy-chain targets. That is, plan for one event/race and when that’s done plan for the next one. This can work well if the events are similar in nature or are spread out giving you a lot of time to make changes to your fitness in between.
Hope this helps!
2 Likes
Thank you very much for all of this, that all made much more sense. The last little question I have is while I am playing with the different plans for the coming year, no matter what I do every training plan finishes building and says “Although Race AI assessed this race as being achievable, a training plan that reaches your target fitness could not be forecasted due to other settings in your profile. You can choose to Save this Training Plan or you can adjust your settings and try again. For help with making adjustments, review our Race AI Setup Guide.”
I cannot for the life of me figure out what setting I have that is making this happen. Before I run the forecast they always say everything is good to go.
Best to reach out to support so they can talk specifics about your account.