How many times a week are you thinking about commuting, and is it mostly city roads or bike path? I have a similar commute, and also target Oly distance racing. I commute 3x a week when I'm properly tri training, more in the off-season. Once a week is my easy day which I'll always commute and go as hard as I want/ don't want. My other days are either bike workout and easy run, or medium run and swim, I'll do at least 2 more commutes, when my legs are feeling up to it, but these are usually pretty laid back (force myself to be ok with getting passed by the try-hards on fixies lol). I used to do one or two easy rides a week, but stopped and replaced them with commutes. I also found I could get away with shorter bike workouts (1-1.5 hrs vs 1.5-2) and still improve more. I have found it can feel like a bit of a PITA to have to bundle up for the winter (Boston) but every time I drive I realize how much more of a PITA that is lol.

i just joined the TrainerRoad beta testers group on facebook and they are going to release an update which allows you to upload outside rides to your TR career to manage your TSS.
should make it easier for you to include your commutes with your TR workouts.

Thanks for the info so far guys. I’m thinking even just 3 commutes a week would be great. I’ve just been having such good gains with the structured training I’m hesitant to go back. Thanks for the tip on the beta, I’ll check it out and maybe try that for a while to see if im still improving.
Thanks!

Do you have a powermeter? Makes a big difference.

Up until quite recently I used to combine TR with a ~15 mile each way daily commute. My approach was:
- Select a high volume TR plan
- Skip all the shorter recovery rides on TR and do them on the commute
- Of the harder workouts, try to identify 1-2 each week that I could do on the commute and do the others on TR, either on a day where I wasn't commuting or where I took the commute easy.

My findings:
- Overall worked fairly well insofar as I got fitter
- I didn't have a powermeter on my commuter bike so was estimating the sessions which meant some didn't work very well if there was some very specific stuff like over and unders.
- Nature of my commute also made it a challenge, even if I had had a powermeter. Less than an hour and quite a lot of traffic lights and busy sections which meant that it was difficult to stick to the structure. Basically my commutes ended up being pretty rough approximations of what TR prescribed. E.g. if TR prescribed a bunch of 1 minute intervals then I'd fit them in during the ride but the length of recover would depend on where there was next a section where I was confident of being able to do 1 minute uninterrupted, and a few would get cut short if a car pulled out in front of me and caused me to hit the brakes. The longer the interval, the harder it was to work them in around the route.
- There were times when the desire to do the work conflicted with riding safely for the conditions. Don't want to be in a position where you're undertaking traffic to finish off the last 30 seconds of an interval, so you need to remember it's not a race!
- I think it was useful doing some speedwork on the bike outside where I was riding by feel and not by numbers.
- Doing TR at the end of the day after commuting ~30 miles wasn't great. However easy I took the commute there was still fatigue in my legs. I could get through sweet spot training but the really hard workouts I'd end up either dialling down or not completing.

With a 9 mile commute I'd be tempted to just use it as recovery/warm-up miles. It's not long enough to do any of the TR sessions I don't think. Not sure if there is a way to skip the warm-up on TR workouts and get straight to the interval work if you jump straight off the commute onto the trainer, that would be useful if so. You could recreate the workouts without the warm-up but that's a lot of hassle, you don't get the on-screen tips and it won't show your plan progress.

I commute five days a week to work, for a total of around 80 - 100km.
I log the data on strava but not in my Trainingpeaks-account, because I regard the commuting rides not as "training".
It certainly adds value, but in my case not in a sense of measurable traingstress.
Kind regards, Dan

Why does it have to be any thing other than just simply commuting? By that don't think of it as training that you need to plan around. Go ahead with your normal training plan and just commute.

As an example, I'm almost exclusively running these days and average 60+ miles per week of "training." I also run commute - 2.3 miles each way - 3 or 4 days per week. All of it's done very easy and gets logged as commuting rather than training per se.