Power meters are letting us measure our training stress and thus our fitness but I think we still do not have any clear way of measuring fatigue and ultimately recovery rate.
So…I wonder if you could use a daily or bi-daily ramp test as a proxy to measure recovery after a hard race (or a long hard ride) and thus get an actual measurement of the rate that you recover? For example, after a race (or event) you could count the number of days it takes to get your ramp test to yield a measurement that is within 90% of your last rested FTP measurement (supposedly done at the beginning of the current training block). I wouldn’t do it more than once a block (or macro cycle) and only time the measurements to be after a hard event when supposedly you have a recovery week scheduled anyway.
The idea being that with this information in hand you can better plan out the distribution of rest days, the length of your meso-cycle (3 vs 4 weeks), as well as how long to taper (if needed) for the next training block.
I would be interested in your opinion on the above as well as any other ideas you might have for measuring fatigue. Let’s start reducing the guesswork around the most important part of training!