It's a pretty simple workout. I ride to Beach Drive by the Mormon temple, which is about 8 minutes from my house. Continue to roll down Beach until I cross Connecticut. And then I go hard for 1-minute after Connecticut and every subsequent stop sign or light all the way down to the end of Beach; turn around, and hit them all coming back as well. 9 solid 1-minute efforts with a 30-second in there on the short stretch just after Connecticut coming back. What's nice is that the recovery varies in between them so there's a few where you're still pretty cooked from the last one.
The embrocation is still burning on my legs. So awesome to actually get outside, even for only 51 minutes.
51 minutes
NP 276 watts
IF .92
TSS 71.9
Not bad for a short outdoor ride. Toit little workout.
Getting an Intensity Factor of .92 to happen in 51 minutes is awesome.
wham, bam.
Posted by: Cliff Dog | March 09, 2010 at 08:13 AM
Yeah, for an outdoor workout it really surprised me. I'm in the 90s in IF all the time on the trainer. Do you know how NP is calculated? There's got to be some intensity multiplier in there, right? Most of the ride was below 200 watts, but there were about 10 minutes around 400 watts, and that brought the NP up to 276, even though the Avg Power was 100 watts lower.
Posted by: Mike May | March 09, 2010 at 08:55 AM
I'm a little late to the table on this one but since you asked for it, Da Numbas will respond.
They may have changed the NP calculation since I last knew it but here was what Andy and Hunter (at least I think it was them) originally came up with: Normalized Power is calculated by breaking down the time sample in question into much smaller chunks (again, the original formula calls for 30-second chunks but that may have since changed). You take the average power for the 30-second window and raise it to the 4th power. Do that for all 30-second chunks in the total time sample and take the average of those numbers. Take the fourth root of that average and you have NP.
As you can guess, the forth power concept puts a premium on the higher wattages (i.e. the "intensity multiplier" you refer to above). To prove it to yourself, you can take an easy example (e.g. a 20-minute block and assign 10-minutes of it @ 100W and 10 minutes @ 300W; you know average will = 200W but you'll find that NP = ~253W.)
Posted by: Joey Numbas | March 15, 2010 at 01:14 PM
I like your explanation. It makes me feel like I'm 4x as fast as I really am. Or even Fast to the 4th, which I think is even more.
Posted by: Mike May | March 17, 2010 at 02:45 PM