Yeah, I’m good with Defender. Thinking about that kind of endless horribleness somehow makes me grin. Now 14 vice grips… I’ve been avoiding it too long. Of course The Sufferfest has hard workouts. I’d even agree it had too few easy ones. I’ve done The Way Out too many times as a way out of doing anything else, and some of the new content fills some of that need to an extent.
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I am good with Defender as well, I just did it again yesterday. It will be interesting to see how I do with Thin Air next week.
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I fully support your sentiments! I have been doing these workouts for ages, only to now get a completely different and unexpected experience. I am to an extent target orientated, so I document my results and workouts and compare it over time. I will see how the comparisons now unfold.
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There is a lengthy thread on the adjustments made to workouts since the move to Systm.
Why have workouts been made easier in the new Systm app?
Thin Air is noted by some (including me) as potentially needing the ftp numbers bumped up by around 10 - 11% to bring it back close to the original Suf version.
@Coach.Neal.H offered a pretty comprehensive explanation on why many of the workouts had been adjusted, this included an assessment of users actually completing sessions.
I suspect that the old TA would have had a very high failure rate as sustained efforts are probably the most challenging type of workout for many.
I regard sustained efforts as being a real strength, and my best 20min effort still remains a TA session from around 10 months ago. Having said that, I recall I still had to pause a couple of times to catch my breath before continuing.
Next time I do TA I expect I will bump up my ftp numbers, but certainly not by 10% - more likely 5%
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Nobody seems to have told my app that workouts are easier. Blender broke me in the first MAP interval today…
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There is value in a rider’s experience with the new app, whether it is positive, negative, or a mix of the two. If a business wants to meet the needs or wants of its consumers, then it should appreciate this feedback. I have been with the Sufferfest for more than 10 years and liked that it had a toughness to it. I don’t see how it could hurt anybody to have access to the originals. If there is doubt about which version is better or more popular, let the consumers decide for themselves and then everyone is happy, or at least as happy as they are inclined to be.
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@eapatrick Yes agree. I have a certain expectation about many of the Sufferfest workouts. If this happens on that ride it means something about my fitness. That calibration, refined over many years, has been lost with the ‘adjustments’. Frustrating, disappointing and makes SYSTM less valuable to me.
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Yes I agree to an extent - I assume it wouldn’t have needed much adjustment to flag up the “hard” sessions with some kind of warning text - “Some people may find this workout… if necessary reduce by 10% blah blah blah”
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Well, have been reading a lot about this ‘softening’ of The Sufferfest since it became wahoosystm …
I will consider myself somewhat lucky that my The Sufferfest app will NOT update to the wahoosystm app since I still run a 10yr old Win7 XP Pro 64 bit laptop and was informed by the tech support staff, they do not support my OS.
So, I am blessed and cursed, since I have to wait for the internet gods to upload my activities to Garmin, usually they load to Strava and TP seamlessly, to be able to see a graph and weekly totals.
I’ve downloaded all the vids to my HDD, my old laptop wont take SDD, so, I have both apps, one downloaded[wont install] and one installed.
So, maybe get an older refurbished Win7 XP Pro pc or laptop, and find the old Sufferfest software app and install it there.
It works for me!
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As mentioned by @Holger1980 the post by @Coach.Neal.H covers the reasoning for this. Essentially there is benefit to reducing the intensity of some of these original literal sufferfests so that people can work out more consistently and regularly hit the targets. There was almost some mysticism in the originals in that they were in someways unattainable, and who doesn’t love chasing something that they may never even reach 
but essentially the new workout intensities were designed so that people can follow and complete them better. For the pain lovers out there, you can still up the intensity percentages on there a little bit if you want that original lung busting, blood boiling, leg searing agony
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@Coach.Andy.T You actually cannot just bump it back up. If you bump it 10% you are already 4% too high on the warmup section, which was not lowered as much as the rest, and also the MAP sections, which definitely changes things, and you still aren’t as high on the FTP sections as the original.
Again, adding new stuff to meet missing purposes, great, definitely even needed for subthreshold/sweetspot activities. But actually I think not many workouts were changed a lot, and for those that were, it would have been better to make alternative versions or alternative content instead of removing the old, completely different, activities that people were still enjoying.
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@RichardK I think most of them haven’t changed much. I haven’t tried Blender. Thin Air changed a ton though.
@CBrweer, For what it’s worth, both apps do actually work for me at the moment in windows 10, so I could just use the old one for some activities, but I don’t expect that to remain true forever, as clearly they won’t be supporting the old app, and I have no idea what will happen with activity logs if switching back and forth.
Yes, I have both apps in the Windows 7 laptop, but, ONLY THE SUFFERFEST runs with no or almost no issues in the laptop.
When using the new app, have too many issues, so, until I get the extra cash, I am outside the US so what you get for around $350 ~ $450, half of its features cost me the same or more, that is why I’ve downloaded all the workouts so I can use the old make me suffer app
Activity logs from what I’ve seen, are accurate, I see my completed apps, for outside workouts, I have to build them in TrainingPeaks and send them to Garmin … Try doing that with The Shovel … For some reason my cellphone sees the sensors but will not read them(now, this would be a nice thing, to be able to send workouts directly to either Garmin or TP)
I log in when I have the time, I work from home, in front of a 3 monitor PC(company’s not mine, so installing is out of the question), so when I am done, I usually don’t want to know much about looking at a screen … I’ve stopped watching TV and on the weekends barely use my streaming services, basically just stream music or use my iTunes or iPod to listen to music
@RichardK, So while I have both apps up, Blender changed but not much. Most of the FTP targets are the same with a few small exceptions. The final warmup ramp effort is reduced about 5%. The first of the final 3 “TT” efforts is a few percent lower. The two long MAP efforts are 4% lower. The tabatta intervals ramp down a little, starting the same as before, but I think doing those on erg mode is crazy anyway. All in all I’d say these are minor tweaks and whatever.
Personally, I’d still prefer they had just left it alone for consistency, but anyway, saying Blender is still hard has very little to do with my point in this thread it seems, since Blender wasn’t modified much at all.
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You can set it so that the increases do not apply to the warmup/recovery sections. You can also adjust the metrics individually.
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Or like Sir Neal says, you can ride it in Level Mode. I still agree with @Still_D though that the description for Thin Air is a little off with the new targets as they are. Some type of explanatory text would be helpful to explain the context, or even, to have a disclaimer like: To Experience this ride as it was originally conceived prior to SYSTM, perform this ride in Level Mode, Turn Off the Power Target metric and ride to RPE.
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You can set it so that the increases do not apply to the warmup/recovery sections.
It doesn’t work. It only works for the full recovery sections, not for the intervals around 11:30, which are only reduced by 6%, not 12 to 13%
You can also adjust the metrics individually.
If I could do this AND adjust an overall multiplier after the warm-up intervals, that would be a lot to remember but it would get it, but you can’t. As soon as you hit the arrow keys, the individual adjustments get wiped out. So the best you can do is raise MAP 6%, raise FTP 12 or 13% (it actually does vary), and then hit the warmup in level mode to memorized targets.
Although I do like level mode sometimes, I still like a known reference. RPE isn’t the same thing.
What would be real simple, would be being able to choose the classic profile.
Anyway, I mean, of course, I can crank things up and get a good cranked up workout. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just not as nice as having the old workout available with the same expectations of where I’ll have to dig deep and hang on.
@Still_D I will have to check out the revised version of Thin Air soon. I never really had any trouble completing the old version so this wasn’t one on my radar to try in its revised form.
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