Hi Trainerroad team. First of all congratulations on your fantastic ML model. Last winter I was able at 42years old and with 5hrs a week to reach a new all time best ftp at 328W.
The topic appears closed here, and it might mostly be solved but I have been getting ftp drops after completed outdoors workouts all summer. And today I had an epiphany (of course during the workout). I believe the reason it twofold.
Firstly, and most obviously, TR drops the workout difficulty of a completed workout when there have been breaks or interruptions, in other words when you have to stop at traffic lights, stop pedalling because of traffic etc. and have to pause your workout. Even when the pause is during a rest period, you still get penalised the same, which should probably not be the case.
Secondly and bear with me on this one. I send my outdoors workouts to garmin, and on my garmin’s screen the intervals appear with a range of plus or minus 10w from target power and you try to be at the middle of the range. But what garmin shows on the interval screen is average power and not NP, whilst TR rates the workouts with NP over certain durations. That should still be ok as NP is/should be higher than the average power for any meaningful duration. But it is not, I have found but watching both screens on garmin, the the NP of the lap/interval I am on is considerably lower than the average shown in the interval screen, and they are slowly merging. Even for my 10min intervals the two power numbers were not the same with the average being higher by 2-3 watts. The reason for this is Garmins delay in calculating NP at the start of an interval, the difference in the first minute for example is stark, with garmin beaping that the power is too high (320W for a 300W interval) whilst the NP of the lap still being around 200W. I think TR might be penalising because the garmin NP is lower especially for shorter intervals. I hope the above made some sense to you.
Thanks
Stav