I’m a coach who’s switched over from using TrainingPeaks to using Intervals ICU as my main base for training programs and coaching. The European winter track season has started up and I’ve noticed it’s pretty difficult to manage track cycling training sessions and especially longer race days on the track within the program. I’m not talking about the actual planning and analysis of the training itself, but purely about how to use Intervals ICU to get the best out of track cycling activities.
As an example: A rider has a 5-hour race day in which there are 5 events, with a longer break between event 3 and 4. This results in a 5-hour ride file of which maybe 90 minutes are actual riding between races, warm-ups and cool-downs. Sprint days are even worse in this sense.
One of the issues is that 2 of those track races on a weekend mean that something like 7 extra hours of activity are logged. Obviously creating 10 separate activities for all the short sections of riding isn’t ideal either. I’ve tried designating every section of riding as ‘work’ by using laps but that way you miss out on actual efforts in training. Using the laps for actual sprints or efforts makes it more difficult to figure out how much the rider has ridden on the day.
The long days also mess up training load numbers and therefore also the whole idea behind the fitness charts (a 9-hour day with an average power of 29 watts and a normalized power of 129 watts and therefore a training load of 380 doesn’t seem to realistic to me).
I’m ready to accept that there’s no good way to deal with this and I just have to get by with what’s available but it’s still worth a try: Are there coaches or riders on Intervals who have figured out a better process to work with track cycling? What could be options to manage it better? And are there ideas out there on how to improve the program itself to better deal with uncommon activities like a full day of track races?
Jens, This is a good question. I’m the father of a track sprinter and a track commissaire (in Australia) who runs tons of sprint events, so I’m familiar with the quirks of track training and racing.
I haven’t thought much about it before now, but one idea would be to have the individual efforts or races be contained within a parent “session”, where each activity is recorded separately and linked to the parent. If we could then aggregate the time, work and other metrics from the associated activities for reporting and analysis, we would be in a good starting spot.
This approach could also work for triathlons, multi-sport events, enduro mountain biking and other disciplines where there are breaks between efforts.
@david - any thoughts on this approach? It might involve a new object that could be a parent to Activities - users could still look at each Activity independently as well as “roll up” to the associated session. There would be other issues to tackle, such as how the user creates a session and selects the activities to be linked to it.
My understanding is that this would be correct. Whether a two hour ride is done at once or split into two identical one hour rides over even two days, the load totals would be the same. The second hour of a two hour ride would obviously be different, but the metrics do not account for that. This would be using Power. On a two hour ride HR would differ likely for the second, but using power there would be no difference in the totals.
So if you have one big file with many different effort sessions, rather than use laps, what if you parsed each effort into an interval? Whatever system, you still after all have to go into files after the day and identify what is what when. I imagine your riders are keeping track of which file is which, if recorded individually, so you know what you are looking at. Same if it’s all one file. You’d have to have some notes on what was done when.
What useful information would you get from an interval that you wouldn’t get from a singular file? What are you reviewing on these race days?