I’ve now been using Athletica for a few months. While the indications I see on form via intervals.icu are nothing but positive, I reckon the proof will be in performance on the ground in the New Year’s Day ’10’ - about 6 weeks away. Here's a banner from Athletica, proclaiming "Train Smarter, not Harder". Does the app live up to that billing? Read on...
The whole training plan seems rooted in science - every so often I see a link to a publication or at the least an athletica blog article. This makes the app seem much less of a black box than, for example, TrainerRoad. There is a regularity about the training plan: each week has a recovery session; a 30:30 short HIIT session; a Threshold session of 4m intervals set at several watts above threshold; two tempo/sweetspot sessions, one of which is at higher gear/lower cadence as a strength training session. Interspersed are endurance sessions, often long enough that I’d prefer to do them outdoors. I’ve also noted that while I sometimes struggle to complete sessions (particularly the Threshold sessions), I am more able to do so than I was with TrainerRoad. Every few weeks, there are threshold and power profile tests scheduled. I’m unsure how these play out in terms of fine-tuning the various parameters, but as far as I understand it, the system looks at the power profile graph as a whole (or maybe specific points along the chart).
The AI advice seems pretty helpful - as long as you pretend it’s real human advice! It really depends on how you describe your workout related to performance, your condition and the RPE of the workout. For AI I think the old mantra of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ holds. If your comments just restate the numerical data but in words, you get a pretty thin bit of advice. The other day I had a long-ish road ride scheduled and I found myself flagging a bit in the second half. The AI engine’s response was a bit critical of my workout, but to me it was clear that fatigue was setting in, and it prompted a rest day on the day after. That decision was applauded by the AI engine, but I was a bit surprised that it didn’t recommend a rest day in the first place.
My Recovery Chart has now populated with sleep, HRV and resting HR data derived from my Garmin Vivoactive 5 watch that I bought a month or two ago. I haven’t seen any signs from these data that I’m overstretching myself. The main impediment to feeling energetic is the occasional night when my sleep is poor.
I’ve continued with the indoor training workout workflow of downloading the zwo file from Athletica and importing into Zwift. And I’ve taken a liking to intervals under Zwift - I like seeing the glowing arches where each segment of the workout starts! I have been caught out a couple of times by changes to the workouts shortly before embarking on a workout - so you do need to be careful not to download the zwo before any last minute updates to the training plan have worked through. An integration of indoor workouts with Zwift might be helpful in this regard. Having said that being involved in the transfer of data between systems is no bad thing in many cases as it encourages one to be a bit more involved in the planning.
I’ve found the Athletica forum to be helpful - while it has a modest posting rate, company reps pitch in with responses quickly.
There’s a new web interface. I was a beta tester, and I think it’s an improvement on the existing UI. Hopefully my comments were helpful. But it’s a minor improvement, and I can see where further improvements could be made. I’ve seen mention of a mobile app, though it’s not clear to me what that would offer over the website - much of what the web site offers seems to work well on the phone.
I’m still a bit perplexed as to how the software could have been designed such that races can only be scheduled for weekends! Many of my races are club time trials on Wednesday evenings. I’m sure I can figure out a workaround on this.
I noted above how my workflow goes regarding executing Athletica workouts on Zwift. Just the other day, I came across an odd and frankly annoying glitch in the Athletica system. I had two workouts scheduled: a 1h29m short HIIT 30:30 session and a 1h21m aerobic development session.
I rode the HIIT session first thing in the morning. After completing it, I found that Athletica had replaced it with a very similar but shoter workout. Well, that was OK - I downloaded the Zwift workout from Garmin Connect and imported it to the HIIT workout in Athletica (recall Garmin Connect doesn't automatically export activities recorded on non-Garmin devices). That was all fine and good. Later that day, I went for a walk, which was recorded on my Garmin watch and ultimately uploaded to Garmin Connect. Normally this would show up as an unplanned activity in Athletica, but on this occasion Athletica overwrote my HIIT workout data with the walk data. That seems to indicate some fragility in the system. I could only sort this out by deleting the HIIT activity, recreating it, and populating it with the Zwift workout. I added the walk as an unplanned activity.
So there are some signs that the platform needs further development (non-weekend races, ensuring workouts don't get over-written). But on the whole I'm pretty happy with Athletica, and it's coming across as something of a breath of fresh air after a few years of training using TrainerRoad. I think Athletica lives up to the "Train Smarter, Not Harder" slogan. Let's see how the New Year's Day '10' plays out!