A couple of weeks ago, I put a Stages Gen 3 left side crank arm on my Orbea Oiz & have been looking at the data for my outside rides. These aren’t training rides, just for fun mtb rides. The first thing I noticed was that my inside ftp setting wasn’t applicable outside. My first trail ride with power ended up showing an IF of 1.06 for about 2 hours. I went hard but nowhere near that hard! Then I found out that I could make adjustments to my ftp in TR for individual rides. So rad!!! Thanks for that @Nate_Pearson @Jonathan @chad & the entire TR team for this functionality -definitely a great feature. I fiddled around & found a suitable outside ftp based on RPE to use until I can assess outside. But anyway back to figuring out what to do with this newly acquired data.
So far, I’ve been stoked to see the lower end of my power curve filling in. I had very little good data for 5 seconds up to a minute or so but now I’ve got numbers reflective of what I can do for those quick durations. At this point, I know that I need to find some steady climbs to figure out where I’m at for 5 minutes & then I’ll be in search of some dirt roads to hammer up for 20 minutes or so. Beyond that just isn’t going to be possible in my neck of the woods of western Massachusetts. It’s been interesting to see that despite me thinking of myself as a more steady state rider, the nature of mtb riding renders that opinion completely false! To that end, with the 6 hour race series I was preparing for now all but cancelled, my next build will be short power or general rather than sustained power because either of those will likely benefit my riding style the most.
Anybody have suggestions as to what else can/should I be doing with the data? I know I need to make time to do some formal testing outside & also plan to schedule some of the TR workouts to do outside but other than that, I’m not too sure.