The Bell curve of cylists - how fast are the average TR users?

[crazycraig]

@Nate_Pearson,

I only created a topic the other week asking to see this sort of data, which took a bit of a hammering, so these graphs are great to see.

Trainerroad User Percentage Tables

So it sounds like a resounding bad idea then The thought was never to provide a detailed analysis and to be too serious, it was just to show a high level view of FTP, W/Kg, as well as some other fields of say, gender, age groups, who use virtual power vs those who don’t, and time people start there workouts at, in a chart / graph forms. Non of the above is going to effect my training, nor is it intended. Whilst @AndyGajda says “No good will come of this…”, I don’t see any harm in it …

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Trainerroad User Percentage Tables

I don’t see the upside, but I can see the downside of impacting people’s confidence. People focus on the numbers too much already. It’s very useful, but training and racing is about much more. FTP shouldn’t really be compared between people in my opinion; different meters, different environments, different protocols…it’s good to measure your own progression and racing, but numbers between two different people could easily be 10% out.

Trainerroad User Percentage Tables

I can’t imagine TR will release this data and I’m not sure how motivating it would be to me. We’re always told that FTP is just a number and that w/kg doesn’t tell the whole story. I can track my improvements in relation to my own history. That said, it would be really interesting to see TR’s dataset just out of curiosity

Trainerroad User Percentage Tables

True dat! FTP is basically one’s general fitness and w/kg is truly only useful for very long and/or very steep climbs. Not too sure of what use publicizing the averages of one really general and one really specific metric would serve.

Trainerroad User Percentage Tables

Some people might get a kick out of seeing which centile they’re in for either metric but it’s unlikely to help anyone in their training motivation.

Trainerroad User Percentage Tables

This sounds like a can of worms to me. Data with very little likelihood of providing any useful direction or help in setting training goals. As others said, I see it potentially derailing people in shooting for targets that are not appropriate or attainable. A pure power or W/kg value doesn’t give any guidance. It is also only a single data point. Things like power curves and PR’s give way more of a picture and context to potential performance (even though that leaves out massive elements of…

Trainerroad User Percentage Tables

I agree that providing this information is not actionable to most people and would likely be demotivating. If people are curious enough, there are plenty of tables out there for people to self measure against and if you just look for Andrew Coggan’s activity on any of the major forums, you can find the information. TrainerRoad’s user population is also a very shifted data set; what may be “average” among TR is likely far to the right of the median in a normal cycling population.

Trainerroad User Percentage Tables

No good will come of this…

Trainerroad User Percentage Tables

Feels kind of like an ego check for everyone - nothing positive out of it in my opinion. There might be some interesting (in a fun fact sense of the word) cuts of the data around percentage of users riding at different times, most popular workouts, average % change in FTP graphed over duration of subscription, most popular plans by type and volume, etc… Not sure anything there is worth development time (still some missing features from the app that are more important in my opinion) but presuma…

Thanks again.