347CX wrote:
I think Nate gets a little salty about it because the TR forum has multiple topics/requests to do a polarized plan (whatever that is). I’d be annoyed too, I kind of see the constant criticism of TR stuff on their forum as being akin to being invited for dinner in someone’s home and telling them how much the cooking sucks. On one hand, the forum is meant to talk about a variety of training perspectives, but on the other hand there’s a lot of crapping on the TR model of doing stuff. So many people with zero coaching experience or even any real racing credentials think they know so much more just because they’ve seen a couple of papers, so I’m not surprised Nate would take that tone.TR is essentially two things; the platform and the plans. TR seems to think of themselves as a training plan company first, with the platform there to support those plans. And they have a lot of conviction in the underlying training philosophies of their plans. But a lot of customers and/or potential customers see TR the other way around; an amazing training platform, but one with a fairly narrow scope of training plans that may be partially or completely at odds with how they'd like to train.
If there's a never-ending stream of requests for "Poarized" (i.e. "80/20") plans, maybe they should, you know, consider giving the paying customers what they'd like to buy instead of getting salty about it. It gets contentious largely because TR appears to steadfastly refuse to even consider accommodate customer's wishes for this, despite a seemingly obvious demand. It's like they take the suggestion that their current training plans may not be the best as a personal insult. Instead, they should take it as a compliment that people like the outstanding training platform they've built so much that they'll keep paying ~$200/year for it even if they have to write their own workouts and/or plans to use it. Continuing to ignore those folks, however, only makes them more restless and begrudging users; ones who talk down the product despite using it and who will jump ship at the first sign of a viable alternative. Accommodating them could turn them into the enthusiastic evangelists who would bring more like-minded users to into the fold.
If TR had any balls, they'd hire an accomplished 80/20 coach to write a series of plans, install them, let that coach play the foil on the podcasts, and use the user data from their enormous customer base to analyze the relative effectiveness of the competing philosophies with a dataset that absolutely dwarfs that of any previous studies.
"They're made of latex, not nitroglycerin"