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Calling all statisticians/data geeks
I want to be able to retrospectively ‘score’ the rides I have uploaded to Garmin connect which will give me a number in relation to how fit I was/am on that ride.
There is loads of info which can be used, but I wanted to concentrate on the following – Av. Speed, Av. HR, Distance and Elevation (can use more if it will help).
The question is this – is there a formula which can be used to mash all of these numbers together and get a ‘score’ for the ride which will reflect how well I did on that ride?
Why? I guess it’s to track some kind of form over the year and where training has had a positive or negative impact on my riding.
**Disclaimer bit** I know that all of the above can also be affected by a million other things including weather, well being, diet, tyre size, terrain, whether wearing baggies or lycra etc and may well be a waste of time.
Cheers
IME the only way to benchmark yourself over the year is to have a specific fixed ride (or better a gym test) that you do flat out and monitor your times perhaps with a HRM and a measure of your recovery by taking HR at a specific point of time after the test.
As I've posted before I think the Altitude stats on GPS are rubbish, there is too much error and they generally overstate total climb / descent. If you download a datafile (eg GPX) and have a look at altitude data you'll see it skip around even if gradient was constant, I've seen a rouge point 500m out !
Create either a Strava or Training Peaks free account and then upload your rides. Strava gives you kj of work done and Training peaks gives you hr TSS (Training Stress score). Not sure how accurate either are, but gives you a benchmark to work from 🙂
Strava suffer score is a reasonable indication of effor over a whole ride - as above you need to repeat the same ride regularly with as few variables as possible (so probably on the road).
Best way to do it is a ramp test on a turbo, though.
Garmin Connect already does this to an extent - look at the "Training Effect" field. It does depend on having a HRM present though.