Tomorrow's suggested workout

I can definitely understand the use-case but based on how this is done (Garmin uses your current recovery status to determine the workout right?), it wouldn't know what tomorrow's workout is until you get to that day.

Good point, but would not the algorithm be able to predict recovery status in the future?  It already tells me how many hours of recovery is needed, so should be able to predict a workout at the end of recovery, or at a certain number of recovery hours into the future.

No, my understanding is that the recovery is based on how you're *actually* recovering so it could be faster/slower than it estimates.  Which would impact the workout it's scheduled for the future.

So say you run a hard run on saturday, sunday you're recovering but do some afternoon drinking and you recover slower than expected.  That could impact what it tells you to do the next day.  No way for it to know that in advance.  

At least that's how I understand it anyway, maybe Garmin-brooks can chime in and confirm.

Good discussion.  Thanks!

Yeah that is kind of an important peice of knowledge.  Similar... what should I wear, if a strong tempo less clothes are wanted then a hour base pace.  However so far all my workouts have been in the hour or under range, also it has been a pretty consistent everyother day strong workout recommended.  

Are you getting large differences in workout time length?  I guess this weekend it said to do 2x20min threshold... low in behold, that was my plan!  it was kind of crazy.  I suppose depending on vo2max / load history it will give recovery/easy days of varying lengths?  But I would imagine for you in particular... the workouts and easy days should be pretty consistent length based on your current fitness?

Today's suggestion for me is Base. Running estimated time: 47:00. Cycling estimated time: 1:53:00. Most of my running are in the 30:00 to 54:00 range. Cycling suggestions are all over the place from 30:00 to today's nearly 2 hour.

Oh yeah, I suppose for cycling the window of time is probably all over the place. It would be kind of nice if there was a setting for 'long run' or 'longer ride' limited to weekend (or day of choice).  I suppose that's tricky for cycling, being that most/many rides are 1.25-2hr+ for a lot of people.  Really a pretty tough thing to program around on Garmin's side of things.  Would almost be nice is if you could select 'limit to X time' workouts, but still allow suggested "hey you need to run/ride long too!" lol  ride 2hrs! lol  
Like all winter a lot of people ride bike trainers or TM, but want to keep even workouts short and sweet, get after it, and be done in 50-70minutes.  Would be nice to set it to suggest workouts in that range or less.  Lots of people aren't going to sit on their trainer for a 2.5hr endurance ride very often.

To Badbri's point the recovery factor is the biggest thing that comes into play. As a general rule you'll typically have a tempo day followed by a recovery day by a base day, followed by an anaerobic day, a recovery day, then a long day, then a recovery day for a 7 day cycle. Of course that is a simplified generalized formula and your data will impact what exactly you see. The issue comes into play when it throws rest days into the mix, that will disrupt the flow of that formula. Minus weekends, (as that is typically when I have seen it give me long workouts (I coached highs school cross country and ran track in college so I write a lot of my own workouts) most of my running workouts have been about an hour. On the weekend I've seen it up to 90 minutes. 

I'm only on day 3 of testing the suggested workout, so not enough sample data to make conclusions as to consistency.  Saturday I cut my long run to 2 hours (lately long run days average 3+ hours).  

Sunday was the first day to try to suggested workout (HR setting) and it gave me 42 minutes base as a suggestion.  I ran that on my "out" and the same again back.  (yes, invalidating my test, but I wanted the miles since I was still much under my typical weekend mileage total)

Monday, I held to the suggested plan for 45 minutes BASE.

Today, I had a SPRINT workout for about the same number of minutes.

So may be a trend to see weekday workouts under 1 hour.  But there is no way I will hold to that on the weekends when I typically log the majority of my base training miles.

I am very curious to see if any of my stats improve with the suggested workouts.

If you do have a preference for long run/ride you could always schedule it on your calendar and it will in which the watch will default to what you scheduled as opposed to the DSW. As long as you stick to your long run consistently more than likely the other 6 days of the week it's not going to schedule anything super long because from the watch's perspective you have an activity over 2 hours within the last 7 days you don't need another one necessarily.