Garmin 'Pause, Resume later'

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Hi. Yesterday I did some training for a backyard ultra. I ran 7 x 6.5km on the hour. This was unplanned. Each time I finished a loop I hit ‘pause, resume later’ before having my ~20mins recovery. As the rests can only be inferred from the time stamps I am not sure whether Athletica.ai is aware I had rests and therefore calculating load/impact on plan correctly.
And on a related note I would have expected my plan to have updated as this was an unusually high load for me but the plan has stayed the same i.e. with HIIT hill intervals today! Is that right?
Many thanks

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Hi @vilbs,
Athletica uses your moving duration. Note how your moving duration is two hours less than your total duration. Therefore pauses are reflected in the load appropriately.
WRT your hill intervals, I can see that you have correctly deleted that session which is what any user needs to do - common sense must prevail. You would eventually see a warning for overtraining on that session but remember that backend logic requires computational time. If you look to next week you can see that nearly every session has a warning for overtraining in light of your very large load yesterday. So Athletica in its current state is doing its job. Athletica should always be used as a tool alongside the athlete’s training journey, but again, common sense human decisions must prevail. Hope that helps.

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Thanks for the reassurance Prof on the load calculation.

I guess the bit I am slightly struggling with is the ‘common sense’ bit. Basically I have none! I get carried away and excited about going faster or further - that’s why I don’t do what my friends do and just ‘train themselves’. I need an expert to tell me what I should do - when to go faster/further and when to rest. I was/am hoping that athletica wouldn’t give me a plan that would overtrain me (even though it is warning me) - that it would auto update the week to reduce the week so I wasn’t overtraining.
Similarly my A race is an Ironman but my longest bike ride is a 3 hour - this doesn’t give me the confidence that I will be prepared for the event.

I am totally sold on athletica (hence I have subscribed for a year) but feel there are some small tweaks to give someone like me (who struggles with training common sense!) some assurance. Maybe I will post a thread on my initial thoughts (the good and the bad) if that would help?

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Hey @vilbs
Oh I totally get you! Common sense sometimes just flies out the door, hey?! I’m there with you, haha. I am also IM athlete. Here’s my two cents:

  1. Athletica takes a conservative approach - to avoid overtraining and doing its’ best to keep athletes healthy. LOVE that!
  2. You need to adjust a little bit on the longer duration spectrum. Agree, 3 hours is not enough for an IM race. Please feel free to lengthen your rides, 2-3 longer 5-6 hr rides are probably enough for most prior to the race. Same with runs.
  3. How to ramp up? I think longer rides are easier to extend - I believe your aerobic rides are scheduled every 3 weeks and the other two weekends are race pace or over-unders when you are on tri program. Runs I would be careful with not to ramp up too aggressively. I would not necessarily run long every weekend.
  4. There a few coaches who are using Athletica https://athletica.ai/coach-connect/ you could hire or at least consult one of us to see if we are a good fit with you , even if it is for a few months so that you can get a hang of training with Athletica and trusting your own gut feeling.
  5. Trusting your gut feeling when it comes to training takes some time, guidance and learning. Human body is an amazing, complex entity, (sometimes a beautiful mess) and we all too often forget the mind-body connection.

Great if you can create your own thread, I am sure many will answer!
Marjaana

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