TrainerRoad · 2019
Plan Builder
Writes each athlete a custom training plan toward their race from the time they have and the events they care about. 158,000 athletes have trained on one. Three in four races athletes target on TrainerRoad have a Plan Builder plan behind them. Adaptive Training and everything after it were built on top of this.
Challenge
TrainerRoad had a library of training plans and a calendar to put them on. Athletes had to pick a plan themselves, guess how to line it up with a race months out, and rebuild it by hand when life changed. Most people picked wrong, or picked nothing. Everyone got the same plan regardless of how many weeks they had or what they were training for.
Approach
Plan Builder asks what you're training for, when it is, and how much time you have, and writes the plan. It sequences base, build, and specialty phases to land on race day, handles multiple events in a season, and puts every workout on the calendar. Add a race or take a week off and it rewrites what's left. I built the training calendar first, in 2018, so there was somewhere for the plan to live. Plan Builder went on top of it in 2019.
Impact
158,000 athletes have trained on a Plan Builder plan. Three in four races athletes target on TrainerRoad have one behind them. Athletes on a plan train at least twice a week in 46% of weeks, against 25% for comparable athletes without one. Last year 89% of subscribers planned a workout on the calendar.
Reflection
This is the foundation. Adaptive Training grades each workout and adjusts the plan, and it only works because there's a plan to adjust. TrainerRoad AI sits on top of that. The least visible layer turned out to be the one everything else depends on.