Curious about guidelines for RPE on highly variable sessions. For example, in total a 2.5 hour group ride, with 30-mins in the middle that is flat out full-on race effort. The rest of the ride is endurance pace.
If you went flat out, give it an appropriately high RPE.
Theory is that it should let the AI know that an effort was near max. If you instead rated it easier, the AI would have to guess how much harder it thinks you could go.
Eddie told me last week to give it the score I’d give it when I have one minute left on the last hard interval. Makes a lot of sense to me.
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That makes total sense for an interval session. But I’m talking about a group ride with polar extremes for the efforts – 2.5+ hours steady effort (z2/z3) and 30 minutes at race pace (zones 3,4,5).
Interesting question. Power varies and HR varied throughout a ride. There is no single HR or power for a ride, though you might think of avg HR, or normalize power as being that. There’s also max HR and max power, but those might be only momentary and don’t necessarily reflect much about the overall ride/workout. RPE is the same, it varies all the time during a ride or workout. There might be a peak RPE, but that also can just be momentary and not reflect much about the overall ride/workout. Is there such a thing as average RPE or normalized RPE?
Always take the hard part as anchor for your RPE rating. Imagine doing a VO2max workout then noodle 60-90min the way home or on the trainer. That would not take anything from the hard part (maybe it would be even harder because tired and want to put your feet on the couch).
I’d rate those at least hard and could probably be also very hard.
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Personally I don’t bother filling out the survey for highly variable unstructured rides.