Hi all,
I’m confused how to take away anything meaningful from this feedback, the zones are all over the place and feedback is just incoherent. Situation:
I had a 1 hr 10 min zone 2 run planned today, planned distance was 7.96mi. On my watch I loaded up the workout, which suggested a HR range of 120-138. That seemed like a reasonable request as I know my VT1 is at 144-146bpm based on lactate testing a couple weeks ago.
I kept my HR between 135-139 for the entire run. To do this, I had to maintain a pace about 30 sec/min slower than suggested. At 1 h 10 min, I finished the workout having ran about 6.5 miles (about 1.5 miles less than planned). I decided to run for longer to achieve more miles because I was feeling good. I ended up doing about 9 miles, still all zone 2 maintaining the same HR. I said my RPE was 3/10 and I was feeling “great.”
But then I get this garble about being out of my zones, yet 99% compliant, and a lot of talk about missing workouts and risking overtraining etc. etc. I was sick the last couple of days which the AI demonstrated it was aware of, but I just don’t know how to interpret anything that’s being said here. It says I’m struggling with zone compliance in recent sessions but I think the reason why I’m struggling with zone compliance is because there’s a big incongruence between my HR zones, pace zones, and power zones.
Hey, sorry AI Coach is being a jerk.
He is being overly strict in my opinion.
Assuming you are new to athletica, please confirm did you do the test week and/or adjusted your training zones? It’s great you had lactate profile test done.
Are your workouts being prescribed by hr or power/pace?
I have it selected as letting the AI decide what to do. I did the test weeks,
Running MAF 142 bpm pace was ~9:10min/mi
Cycling MAF 142 bpm power was 209W
FTP test 20 min portion was 277W, estimated FTP to be 263W
I opted to not do the 5k TT though because I was coming off a 5K PR training block a month prior where the 5k TT was 19:30.
Thanks a lot for your feedback Evan. First of all:
the coach will warn you about missed workouts to make you aware to stick to the plan. This part of the feedback can use some tweaks as indeed in your case it is too strict. We will improve it as soon as we improve the plan compliance analytics. We are working on that, so we ask you to be patient
The biggest problem you are facing stems from the pace and HR zones being not aligned and the fact that the coach prefers referring to external metrics (power for bike or pace as in your run case) as they are more robust (assuming they are correctly set). Even if you did all tests properly, there is still be some misalignment for your individual case. Considering your illness, you cannot probably hit the prescribed workout 100%, and that is fine.
While we are working on finding a solution to improve HR-pace/power zones alignment, I warmly suggest you to update all your zones manually if you find discrepancies between pace and hr zones - as it seems to be the case, so that ideally you end up running at the right Z2 pace and HR.
A part from that, notice that, even if your coach focused on HR zones, you did not respect prescriptions, as you can see from the time in zones. So, kudos to you about getting the right load, but the coach takes the data from the zone graph to give you feedback.
What is the best way to update? Any guidance?
Are the manual settings overwritten as soon as Athletica.ai recalculates the zones or is the automatic piece deactivate after manual adjustments?
You have to go to Overview tab → you will find the zones there. You can set them manually, both power/pace and HR:
critical power/pace is the start of Z4
critical HR is the middle point (approx) of Z4
If you know how your hr - power/pace zones should align, you can thinker with this 2 settings until you see that the zones align as you expect.
This manual update will always be preferred to any automatic update, unless you explicitly confirm to update your zones when receiving the “update prompt”. You can simply dismiss all update prompts and your zones will stay as you set them.
Thanks, I can work with that, even though my expectation of their accuracy was a different one after importing some years of workouts plus doing the training week, when starting to use Athletica.ai
But nobody is perfect even not the digital twin of mine
I find the ai coach with the latest update to have a consistently rude tone. Overall things are going really well with the program but I frequently want to punch the ai coach. I used Athletica.ai for my offseason training last winter as well and the ai coach feedback was much much much better back than. What was better - better tone, responded with some empathy to any comments I added, was not pushy and rude when something in life required me to deviate from the plan. There have been multiple times in the lasts couple weeks that I felt great at the end of a session and then it turned to anger when I read feedback. This is not a case of it not going well in the program but just an ai robot with an attitude problem. Tried turning him off but it also turned off the mini comment at the bottom of each session on the training plan page. I like those little comments so not quite sure what to do.
Sorry you feel this way and just to let you know we are and are working on making AI coach feedback much more fun, supportive and motivating. if you can just give him the cold shoulder at the moment… it will get better
Thanks for reaching out. Can you please provide some examples to let us understand better? The instructions are to always be ‘encouraging’ actually, so this would be a weird behaviour, worth investigating. Can you please copy-paste here the messages in question and underline where the rudeness lies? Sorry for this
Another one. The system has been building me up to a race yesterday, tapering and everything, then at actual race feedback, is like it doesn’t realise it’s the race it is talking about, and is talking a little confusingly. A little bit of a letdown after All the buildup!
Well, if it makes you feel any better, my A race was a swimrun last year and it came in as 14 different workouts. I didn’t even bother checking what the coach had to say about those.
after importing some years of workouts plus doing the training week, when starting to use Athletica.ai
even not the digital twin of mine 
if you can just give him the cold shoulder at the moment… it will get better 
