Amongst all the activities I log I include caving trips in intervals.icu, as recorded by my Garmin smartwatch. Caving is a combination of standing still, zone 2, bodyweight load sprints as you ascend ropes and endurance weight training as you crawl and climb, with the occasional all out effort when the cave is tight and I’m stuck. I currently leave the load as it’s recorded. The category defaults to weights but I change to “other”. Does the category affect how intervals.icu uses the data?
For context, I recently did a 7 hour trip requiring 220 metres of rope with a total ascent of probably 250 metres. Load was 190 and I was definitely tired the next day.
I’ve done that kind of thing 35-40 years ago but never recorded anything. At that time, even HR sensors were not existing or very sparse 
To your question: Yes, the category affects the outcome for these reasons:
- You will not have GPS velocity or even any other kind of idea at what speed you’re going and also nothing for Power measurements
- That leaves you with just one metric and that is HR
- If any kind of erratic speed stream would be detected, the ‘moving’ time will be bogus
- A 7 hour trip for that kind of work, should have a higher load, probably around ~300 at least depending on the number of efforts with high intensity
You can use ‘Other’ or create your own category to avoid getting things mixed up with eventual Weight training/Yoga/… Use the Add button to set up something specific for this kind of activity.
In the category that will be used there are, for what I see now, two important settings:
- Use HR as primary load metric
- Set Ignore velocity to Yes, to make sure that all time is considered ‘moving time’ and that all HR measurement will be counted as active, and creates Load. I suppose you already deactivate GPS on your watch profile? If not, the entrance of a cave will have some erratic speed measurements.
And off course, make sure to set a plausible LTHR
I thought you meant I could make a custom activity.
Why would the load be higher? Why would I not use what the watch measured? Half of it was slow and abseiling.
What did the watch record? Which streams?
HR, Power, elevation, distance, speed…?
Anything specific to caving?
As i tried to explain., Intervals counts Load for moving time when a distance/speed stream is available. If that stream is erratic, Load is not correct. In that case you need to ignore the speed and count all time as active.