Hi All,
bit of a background: I decided to trial athletica.ai (I was self-coached, I don’t want to pay for a human coach nor do I believe for someone like me, who doesn’t race other than maybe a gran fondo here or there, it has value, but I want to try AI feedback in training and settled on athletica) and if I like it I will jump in and buy the 6-month package after my vacation for when my 2025 season starts in early December as that is a nice deal and will take me to summer where I will do my long rides in the Alps and want to be in shape for.
Onto the features I feel are missing (and do let me know if they exist and I just didn’t find it):
- I see no way to tell the program that I will not ride for a week because I am away. I understand that you can just not do the workouts and the tool adapts, but I don’t like that, I want to see that period as empty in the Performance Potential chart for one, and for the other it feels wrong. So I ended up deleting all workouts for 3 weeks manually. Something like intervals.icu’s Clear Week would be very helpful.
- It is very hard to add manual workouts (thanks Paul I found how to do it after you explained it to me in the intervals forum) but it seems for each item in a workout you must click on “Add new detail” and then when you are in the editor it is manually clicking to select zone and the clicking lags a bit. Something like the intervals.icu approach with shorthand notation and a new step is just a new line is so much faster and also allows easy copy and paste and then small edits.
- Whenever you change something (be it adding a workout, changing a workout) there is a lag because it looks like the whole thing is recalculating. I would suggest an edit mode where you can make changes without it recalculating so the editing is smoother. If it takes longer once done to recalculate so be it but that experience is better than lagginess.
- Is there a way to add custom charts? Similarly if the Data & Analysis would be more flexible like selecting periods (or basing it on the laps from the bike computer) that would already be very useful, I actually like how it looks, then more complex adding charts into it manually like say you want to draw a line for 90% maxHR.
Obviously I am not a paying customer (yet, likely) so this is more feedback than requests.
Other than that, there is a reason I decided to test athletica and it’s because it looks good, is flexible (I also had a look at AI Endurance and that seemed awful in comparison), and provides a lot of info on the science that it is based on. So by no means is this post intended negatively, and I am in fact looking forward to using the tool.