Life happens and plans change. If your events have been canceled or rescheduled, don’t worry. Plan Builder can help keep your training on track. You can adjust your training plan, event schedule, and calendar to make sure you can reach peak fitness on race day.
How to Adjust Your Training
When it comes to racing and training, athletes put in plenty of effort planning. Races, workouts, and events are often put on the calendar months or even years in advance. So when a race gets canceled or rescheduled it can have a big impact on your plan. This is inconvenient, but the good news is that your training can always be adjusted. Just like an event can be rescheduled, so can your training.
The way you should adjust your training will depend on the priority of the event, and whether it was canceled or rescheduled. If your event was rescheduled, the new timeline leading up to race day will also play a role. With these variables accounted for, you can adjust your training and move forward.
Rescheduled Events: Near Future
If your important event has been rescheduled to a date in the near future, you can move that event on the Calendar and complete a maintenance block before your race. A maintenance block focuses on keeping your fitness sharp by cutting back on the volume while maintaining the intensity. That way you will refine your fitness from the training you’ve already done while shedding fatigue so you’ll peak at the right time.
Rescheduled Events: Long Term
If your race has been rescheduled and is now a long way away, you should decide whether or not you’d like to continue to prioritize this event. You can continue to make this event a priority and train for it, or choose to focus on a different race that is sooner.
If you want to keep training for the rescheduled event you have two options. You can readjust your season and take the extra time to focus on a different aspect of training, or you can continue to build towards your event. If you choose to focus on a different aspect of training, one option is to address any weaknesses or training with specificity for the event. On the other hand, you can keep building your fitness and grow your aerobic base.
For example, if you know that your upcoming event is going to require a lot of sustained power, then you can take this time to focus on sustained power and complete workouts that will address the strengths you want to build and weaknesses that you want to address.
With that said, it’s important to consider the mental and physical strain that many long months of training can cause. This could make your season of training really long which can lead to excessive fatigue or burnout.
Your Event Has Been Cancelled
The same principles apply to canceled races. If your event has been canceled, then we recommend choosing a new event to replace the canceled one. When your new event is close to the previous one, you can integrate some additional maintenance weeks, or subtract a few training weeks to keep on track. If your chosen event is in a completely different time of the year, consider taking some time off to work on something else before you build again. Depending on your training up to this point, you could continue to build towards your event.
Plan Builder
If you’re a TrainerRoad athlete and using Plan Builder, the good news is that it will manage your training and schedule for you. The process is easy. All you need to do is delete or reschedule events to a future date in your TrainerRoad Calendar. Plan Builder will automatically readjust your training plan to fit your new schedule.
Editing and Deleting Events
C Races
If you need to delete a C event, you can do so by selecting the event on your Calendar and hitting the trash can icon. Deleting a C event has a very minor impact on your training plan so don’t worry too much about the deleted event. You can try and find a new race to do on that day, add a workout of your choice, or take the day off.
B Races
If you need to delete a B event from your Calendar, go ahead and select the event and hit the trash can icon. This will delete the event and any openers that you have scheduled. When you delete an event, Plan Builder will ask you if you want to recalculate your event. Select the recalculate option. While you are on this recalculation page, you will have an opportunity to edit any of your other events. So if you have any other C events, B events or A events, you can adjust them then.
Once you are done, your plan will be automatically adjusted. Your updated plan may change the number or types of training blocks to get you ready for race day.
A Races
Because your TrainerRoad plan is designed around your priority event, it’s necessary to have one of your events marked as an A event in your Calendar. If you need to delete your top priority event from your Calendar, you should make one of your B races a priority event. Another option would be to find a new A event.
When events are canceled or rescheduled, don’t worry. By adjusting your training blocks and focus, you can make your hard work pay off on race day. Even better, let Plan Builder take care of the details and automatically adjust your training plan.
For more cycling training knowledge, listen to the Ask a Cycling Coach — the only podcast dedicated to making you a faster cyclist. New episodes are released weekly.
