or just RPE. Completely agree with you on the goal question. I’ve had a power meter for years and haven’t used it to pace my effort on a century ride.
Yesterday I did a century, wasn’t feeling well from training load, work stress, and allergies. My nose was running like a faucet the entire ride, and woke up sick from allergies this morning. Despite that I had fun and ended up with normalized power at 70% FTP - in other words Intensity Factor for the ride was 0.70.
Most of the centuries I’ve done have IF between .8 and .85. When riding with groups and trying to push for 5.5 hour finish time on a rolling course there tends to be more punchy efforts and my power distribution for the 0.85 IF ride (3400’ climbing, back loaded) looks more like this:
But I rode that to RPE and didn’t pay attention to my power meter.
Compare that to yesterday’s mostly solo, “wish I had a bunch of Kleenex with me” just get it done 0.70 IF (4600’ climbing, back loaded) effort:
Hope that helps.