Is it normal to have a 90+ percent score but not be completely exhausted? I did a ride two weeks ago that near killed me and was 86% percent. Rode today, went hard but not that hard and it was 91%. Both were longer rides.
It depends.
How long is long (that you refer to)?
It can be more intense (higher intensity) and be easier. Intensity is nothing without duration.
3, 3.5 hours and 6 hours. The 6 hours one I was exhausted on.
@Ross_Taylor_Blaydon all % reflects is how your ride matched your planned WO.
If you input a WO that is 50w for 5 mins, and then do that, you get 100%.
If you’re wanting indicators of how fried you feel, you’d want to look at W’ balance, total kj work over thresh, TiZ in zones 4 - 6, etc.
I think the OP is talking IF.
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If I’m understanding correctly, you’re talking about the Intensity stat that is calculated as NP / FTP. That doesn’t consider the duration at all. Riding for six hours with a normalized power of 86% your FTP sounds extremely hard. Messing up your fueling at all could make it impossible. It makes sense that you felt wrecked.
I’m impressed that you could ride for 3 or 3.5 hours at 91% your FTP without also feeling exhausted.
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I would wager that Ross’s FTP is set too low.
I could be wrong here, but my opinion is that almost nobody would be able to ride 6 hours at 86% or 3.5 hours at 91%.
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I was thinking about the FTP. Although I did play about with the duration of the calc and it’s not steered me wrong before. I’ll try to squeeze in a ramp test if I can.
It depends. If you have enormous anaerobic power and you do a low-intensity ride with many long sprint intervals, you can end up with a ridiculously high normalized power. IF is based on NP, so you can “cheat” the system.
It’s not something you would normally do, but if you want to, you can.
Enormous any kind of power is not something to factor in right now.
Good point - I was thinking of rides where the mean power and normalized power aren’t wildly different.
Update. The FTP idea was on the right lines. Just did the same route tonight as Saturday and am 2mph faster and my FTP has went up 15w. Bike fit this morning has made a huge difference.