Most cyclists have one ride in the week that doesn't move. The Tuesday night Zwift race. The Thursday crit at the local circuit. The Saturday club ride that always turns into a fight on the last climb. From V1.474, you can add your weekly group ride or race when you create your training plan, and LeCoach builds the rest of your week around it. You can also add, change or drop it through the coach chat at any time.
Why your weekly group ride belongs in your training plan
A fast group ride or a race is real training. Often it's the hardest session of your week. If your plan doesn't know about it, you end up with threshold intervals the day before your crit, or a VO2max session on top of a Saturday ride that already emptied the tank. Something has to give, and usually it's the quality of both.
A good coach plans around the rides you love instead of asking you to skip them. That's what this does. Your weekly ride or race becomes part of the plan, counted as real training load, and the other sessions fit around it. It's the same idea behind our personalized cycling training plans: the plan follows your life, not the other way around.
How to add a weekly ride or race when you create your plan
During plan creation, LeCoach asks: Do you have a weekly recurring ride? Answer yes and fill in a few details for each ride:
Name: for example "Tuesday Zwift race" or "Sunday club ride".
Day: the day of the week it happens.
Ride or race: a group ride or a race.
Time: for a ride, the total time. For a race, the race time plus the easy riding around it, like your warm-up and the spin home.
Effort: a slider from easy endurance to all-out race. A chatty social ride and a crit are very different sessions, and this is how LeCoach tells them apart.
Details (optional): anything that helps, such as "first 15 min hard, then steady tempo, last 15 min all out".
You can add more than one. Plenty of riders have a midweek race and a weekend group ride, and both can go in.
What LeCoach does with it
Once your weekly ride or race is in, LeCoach treats it as a fixed part of your week:
It shows up every week in your plan. A weekly ride gets a repeat icon. A weekly race gets a gold "Weekly race" badge, so you can spot it at a glance in your agenda.
The rest of the week is planned around it. That day is taken, and a hard race counts as one of your hard days. LeCoach keeps the week's other hard sessions off the days right before and after it, so you arrive fresh enough to race and recover properly afterwards.
It counts as planned training. Your race isn't treated as unplanned extra work. It counts toward your weekly load and your plan health score, just like any other session.
Your goal event comes first. If you're building toward a target event, LeCoach doesn't place your weekly race in the final week before it, so your taper stays a taper. Weekly group rides stay in.
It syncs like everything else. Your weekly sessions go to Intervals.icu along with the rest of your plan.
Add or change your weekly ride through the coach chat
Already have a plan? Or did your club move its ride from Saturday to Sunday? Just tell the coach. A few examples of what you can type:
"I race Zwift every Tuesday, 45 minutes, all out, with a 15 minute warm-up."
"My Saturday group ride is 3 hours of zone 2. Make it a regular ride."
"Make my Tuesday race 60 minutes."
"Move my weekly race to Wednesday."
"Drop the race next week, I'm away."
The coach shows you the change first, and you decide whether to save it. It also works the other way around: the coach won't touch your weekly rides or races unless you ask about them. They're yours. More on how plan changes work in how to make changes to your training plan.
On days when you're not feeling it
Race night after a bad night's sleep? If your morning wellness looks off on a weekly race day, LeCoach gives you a simple choice: do an endurance ride instead, take a rest day, or race it anyway. Your call. Sometimes the right answer is to race, and the plan respects that.
And if you miss your weekly race altogether, LeCoach can add a VO2max workout on a free day to make up the hard work, or you can just let it go. A missed weekly group ride gets the usual options: move it, swap it, spread it out, or let it go.
An example week
Say you race the Tuesday evening crit, 45 minutes all out with 30 minutes of easy riding around it, and you join a 3 hour club ride on Sunday. You tell LeCoach both during plan creation. Your plan now has the crit every Tuesday with its gold badge and the club ride every Sunday with its repeat icon. Monday and Wednesday stay easy, so you're fresh on Tuesday and recover well after. Your key interval session lands later in the week, with enough space before the weekend. Every week holds the same shape, while the workouts around it still progress as your fitness grows.
Try it
Creating a new plan? Add your weekly ride or race when LeCoach asks. Already on a plan? Open the coach chat and tell it about your weekly race or group ride. If you want to know more about how LeCoach balances hard and easy days, read how to structure your weekly cycling training or how to recover between hard sessions.