"NP busters" are those rides that seem to "game" NP, producing an impossibly high estimate of what the rider is capable of. I've never produced one of these rides, but then again, I don't race crits, and I've never gone out of my way to try to create an NP buster. Never having looked closely at an NP buster ride, I would have assumed that they exhibited high "VI" (or NP/AP ratio).
Dr. Coggan collects these files, and he's said that many of them have a VI near 1; i.e., average power and normalized power are pretty close to one another. So:
1. Isn't such a ride just as much an "AP" buster as an "NP" buster? I mean, if average power was pretty close to normalized power, but I couldn't put together a steady effort of the same average power, then why blame NP?
2. What the heck? Are there really riders who can produce, e.g., rapidly alternating 400W and 200W efforts for much longer than they can produce a steady 300W effort? This is extremely hard for me to imagine, but maybe my imagination is overly constrained by how I ride and train.
3. If I were such a rider, and I was attempting a course were straight AP pretty much determines time (e.g., a really steep uphill time trial), should I try to ride a "buster", rather than a steady pace? If so, man, Alex, you can stick that in your "optimization" pipe and smoke it .
Thanks,
Keith
Dr. Coggan collects these files, and he's said that many of them have a VI near 1; i.e., average power and normalized power are pretty close to one another. So:
1. Isn't such a ride just as much an "AP" buster as an "NP" buster? I mean, if average power was pretty close to normalized power, but I couldn't put together a steady effort of the same average power, then why blame NP?
2. What the heck? Are there really riders who can produce, e.g., rapidly alternating 400W and 200W efforts for much longer than they can produce a steady 300W effort? This is extremely hard for me to imagine, but maybe my imagination is overly constrained by how I ride and train.
3. If I were such a rider, and I was attempting a course were straight AP pretty much determines time (e.g., a really steep uphill time trial), should I try to ride a "buster", rather than a steady pace? If so, man, Alex, you can stick that in your "optimization" pipe and smoke it .
Thanks,
Keith