Regarding the name change, though, I have an idea. If you want to improve upon FTP, then you should name it what it is: estimated lactate threshold. This disambiguates it from wrong interpretations of what FTP supposedly means (e. g. 60-minute max power), it is clearer and most importantly, it is scientifically accurate.
And I assume it is internal for good reason: it is not clear for whom this metric works well and for whom it doesn’t.
The difficult thing is that I can easily see several layers of metrics, e. g. metrics to compare seasons or so. E. g. it’d be nice to have an end-of-season report where e. g. I’d see stuff like total hours, total hours in zones, average hours per week, etc.
For example, the metric I’d probably want to know in addition to FTP is endurance/repeatability. I know that this isn’t very easy to quantify or score, but endurance is essential and typically forgotten by beginners who tend to focus only on FTP. But you could first create an absolute weighted score that measures how many intervals and how many minutes you manage e. g. at threshold or VO2max. Then you rank all athletes. You don’t actually expose this absolute score to the athlete, though, but you compare athletes relative to one another. E. g. you could compare athletes of the same gender with either the same FTP or W/kg with one another; perhaps you throw in age as well.
Once you have these metrics, you could classify and rank athletes. Not that you’d want to expose that I am in the bottom 20,000s of sprints or so, but you could categorize people and build a profile. You could identify relative strengths and weaknesses, and then suggest e. g. two training plan alternatives, one to improve your strengths, the other to address your weaknesses. I am sure you have thought of this as something you’d like to have in 10 years or so.
Thanks for sharing, that’s pretty neat. Did you feel the score was accurate and informative? (I remember that you had a training hiatus before Cape Epic and didn’t feel you were anywhere near the top of your game. Just subjectively from how you spoke of your fitness, I would have expected a larger drop in fitness score.)
Yeah, that’s the big one for sure and really needed to get an accurate picture of the fitness of an athlete. Especially when it comes to endurance rides, TR has me way too low, because I don’t do long trainer rides in the summer (I don’t have more than 2 hours in the morning, 2 hours is stretching it, and on the weekend, I wanna be outdoors).