Apologies if there is an easy answer as I am a first time user of intervals.icu (for running).
1) Better calibrating Fitness metric?
I’ve imported data - activities with pace and HR data from COROS, going back 12 months. Load, fatigue, and fitness are showing up fine in intervals.icu but they just seem pretty… off?
The fitness in September was 52 when the athlete struggled their way to a 16:08 5km, while they’ve just done a 14:40 5km and fitness is still 52. Is this just a limitation of the fact that load is more or less a product of HR and time, so longer intervals with a higher HR will create “more load” than shorter intervals with only a marginally higher HR.
2) Calibrating Race Efforts and Load
Similarly, the athlete does not like to wear their watch while racing - I can manually create a workout with time in zone to create load but it just seems totally incongruous - e.g. an 8:30 3000m race having a similar load of 35 to a 40min easy run (load 36).
3) Converting Race Efforts into Season best Efforts
Is there a way to take a race effort and have it show up in the pace tab as a best effort as that would drastically change the curve. E.g. Outside of races the 3km best is a 10:40, but the athlete has raced 8:30.
Apologies again if rudimentary questions - have done a search of the forums so far but failed to find anything specific.
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Fitness has little to do with how fast you can currently run. It is more an assessment if how ready you are to produce your best effort based on your current training history. Ie you are tapered and not carrying residual fatigue into a race or time trial.
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For the 3k race effort, was it recorded by watch as at least 3k? If showing as say 2.9k it wouldnt be accepted as 3k best despite what the race is advertised at.
The model basically uses a formula that essentially uses an intensity value mult by duration. I havent seen any model that wont have the same outcome between easy run of around 45min against a high intensity 3k short duration effort. This is a failure of this type of modelling of physiology and ability to model the stress on and the ability to adapt to different types of load.
actually for me Garmins EPOC score - very similar to tss - just much better accounts for hard efforts above lthr. From my experience and two very different rides: 4h z2 and 1h with 5x4m vo2max intervals, both gave very similar fatigue afterwards and ofc from tss perspective 4h was like 3x the tss, but to my surprise epoc was very similar. So as much I hate garmin, I must say epoc is kinda interesting and ncie to track.
Yes i follow the Garmin training load too. It perhaps is biased more towards the higher intensity. However at the end of the day does it really matter if you are consistently doing a mix of workout types, its whether the measured load is staying stable, increasing or decreasing that gives an indication of how hard you have been training.
It is not about hardness of your training but volume. TSS has a huge problem properly calculating volume of a high intensity short workout at least comparing to how it measures load for long steady workouts. In short (bc I think you completly misunderstood what I said): from tss perspective 140km ride is 3x the load of a 5x4m vo2max 110%+ intervals meaning that if I look at tss and calculated fitness from it, I should be able to do those 5x4m intervals 3 times during one day which is clearly impossible bc the resulting fatigue from just one set is same as 140km ride (at least for me). So tss and fitness graph maybe can show how much you are prepared for a long steady workouts but misjudges hard workouts and if we consider a race being a hard workout full of short hard intervals, it completely miss judges load of such a race. Contrary to that, epoc seems to do much better work calculating load for hard workouts, meaning it can be much more realistic when predicting your ability to race. OR like me to predict how much rest I need after a hard workout bc tss is completly wrong here.
No i totally agree with what you are saying with regards to the mismatch but i don’t think that any individual would have the same fatigue mechanism as another and require different recoveries too. I am just saying that neither model can be relied on to be more accurate on individual level than the other due to individuals physiology and it is down to individual perception to determine the internal load and state of recovery aided by whatever data is available. As a runner, fatigue from dynamic loading on joints and tendons is much more important than for a cyclist. And effort is more even than variations required in cycling where you can cruise downhills. Downhill running is harder than uphill running esp on greater gradients. Thanks for reminding me about Garmins Training load. I believe Suunto also uses similar calc to Garmin.
agree too, just saying tss is a strict simple model same for any human being (as long your zones are set correctly), epoc somehow uses hr, power and respiration rate plus vo2max calc to give individualized load even more same two workouts done by me in two diffrent states of fatigue gives me different number (workout done when fatigued gives much higher load)
and again, I kinda hate garmin but I think epoc is not that crazy or to say same thing from other point of view, TSS is crazy simplificated view on matters. After a block of 3 weeks of vo2max my fitness by TSS dropped by 20, and my fitness by epoc rised by 10.