WKO+ - Manual Entry

[Felt_Rider]

As a PM newbie I am wondering how to handle my current situation in tracking data. My current setup is as follows. I have a 9-spd setup with the PT Pro with a 53/39 crank & 11-23 cassette, which I use primarily on the trainer through the weekdays and on occassion when I know my route is going to be fairly flat.

I use a 10-spd primarily on most outdoor riding (normally only on Saturday) since I prefer the compact crank & 11-28 cassette for bigger hills/mountains. Rather than take the time to swap wheels and cassettes for the 10-spd I have either been uploading the Garmin 305 into WKO+ and edit the data with a TSS number entry or do a WKO+ "manual entry" using the data from Garmin 305 with a guess of average watts in order to have a TSS number registered for the day I am using the 10-spd.

What is the best way to enter this data more accurately if I continue to use the 10-spd on some of these outdoor rides?

Is it worse from a training load aspect of guessing at numbers for TSS in the described manner above or not entering that data at all?

Do you see a better way of me handling this until I can get another PT wheel for the 10-spd? (Not sure when that will be, but I am grateful to be stepping incrementally into training with power.)

If I had the time (and I know it only takes a few minutes to swap cassettes), but my time really is pretty limited and I find myself just grabbing the bike that I think I need at the last moment based on the route selected.

 

[Meek One]

As a PM newbie I am wondering how to handle my current situation in tracking data. My current setup is as follows. I have a 9-spd setup with the PT Pro with a 53/39 crank & 11-23 cassette, which I use primarily on the trainer through the weekdays and on occassion when I know my route is going to be fairly flat.

I use a 10-spd primarily on most outdoor riding (normally only on Saturday) since I prefer the compact crank & 11-28 cassette for bigger hills/mountains. Rather than take the time to swap wheels and cassettes for the 10-spd I have either been uploading the Garmin 305 into WKO+ and edit the data with a TSS number entry or do a WKO+ "manual entry" using the data from Garmin 305 with a guess of average watts in order to have a TSS number registered for the day I am using the 10-spd.

What is the best way to enter this data more accurately if I continue to use the 10-spd on some of these outdoor rides?

Is it worse from a training load aspect of guessing at numbers for TSS in the described manner above or not entering that data at all?

Do you see a better way of me handling this until I can get another PT wheel for the 10-spd? (Not sure when that will be, but I am grateful to be stepping incrementally into training with power.)

If I had the time (and I know it only takes a few minutes to swap cassettes), but my time really is pretty limited and I find myself just grabbing the bike that I think I need at the last moment based on the route selected.

Bump for the same issues when I train on my fixie...

 

[Alex Simmons]

Do the swap occasionally so you at least get some idea of the IF/TSS for a typical ride, then you can adjust up/down depending on RPE.

I think once you get past >10% of rides being manual entries, you are beginning to lose the value of the Performance Manager. I only say think and it's an arbitrary number I've plucked out of my backside but I know from the riders I coach that there are some PMCs I cannot rely on due to these reasons.

 

[Felt_Rider]

Do the swap occasionally so you at least get some idea of the IF/TSS for a typical ride, then you can adjust up/down depending on RPE.

I think once you get past >10% of rides being manual entries, you are beginning to lose the value of the Performance Manager. I only say think and it's an arbitrary number I've plucked out of my backside but I know from the riders I coach that there are some PMCs I cannot rely on due to these reasons.

Thanks for the tip. I did that on a ride 2 weekends ago that I could use the 9-spd with PT hub on a typical group ride with rolling hills. So I have been using that number on other group rides using the 10-spd because the average speed, elevation, time, distance and perceived effort is very similar.

That helps answer the data reliability question from a coach's point of view. Hopefully I can find another wheel on Ebay in the near future.

 

[Felt_Rider]

The Monday ride had me stumped though and could not be compared to past rides.

I was struggling physically (wasn't feeling good) so my efforts while climbing was subpar and obviously with 40+ mph speeds there was a lot of non-work going down steeper descents compared to my normal group rides.

There is TSS to be applied even if minimal, but no idea how

 

[daveryanwyoming]

...There is TSS to be applied even if minimal, but no idea how

It's probably not as minimal as you think. You spent nearly four hours riding. You were probably going at least lower L2 across the entire ride so just as a swag say your IF was 0.6 and remember IF and TSS both rely on NP, not AP so it tends to give a bit more emphasis on the climbs and hard sections. So with the IF swag of 0.6 you'd rack up 36 TSS per hour ridden or roughly 144 TSS for the ride. And that's assuming you were in the low end of L2. Take that swag a bit higher with an IF of say 0.7 and you'd get ~ 200 TSS for that same ride.

Estimating TSS on a hilly group ride with climbs, descents, sitting in, etc. can be tough and as Alex pointed out the accuracy of your PMC will suffer if you estimate too many of your workouts. But you can still take a pretty good stab at it by being honest about how hard you worked, how you felt on the climbs, how much time you spent at the front on the flats or how hard it was to match the pace of the group. Those are all clues to how much effort you put out and should help you narrow down the IF and from it the TSS of the ride.

FWIW, I'd put the PT wheel on the 10 speed road bike as those rides are a lot harder to estimate than a steady trainer ride. Besides most folks put out a bit more power during steady efforts outdoors so you might get a better FTP estimate by tracking some long outdoor intervals. Once you've got a few indoor rides characterized you should be able to get a pretty good indoor TSS estimate just from speed and time on your trainer.

Good luck,
-Dave

 

[Felt_Rider]

Thanks Dave for the insight

 

[frenchyge]

At the risk of answering a question not asked, I'd make the following comments/suggestions:

1) I think I'd rather have the power data for the outdoor rides than the indoor ones. Except for testing, I'd have an easier time faking the indoor ride data.
2) I typically ride a 9-spd PT wheel on my 8-spd trainer bike. It's not perfect, but with shifter feathering it's serviceable and I haven't noticed any issues in the cassette, especially since smooth shifts are less important indoors.
3) I'd suggest either getting a 12-27 9-spd cassette and riding the 9-spd bike all the time, or leaving the 10-spd cassette on the wheel and shifting the wheel between the 2 setups without changing the casette. I had to buy a second wiring harness to do this on my wired setup, but it's a lot cheaper than buying a second wheel.

 

[Felt_Rider]

I suppose I was instinctively looking at it the way you guys mentioned but without pure understanding. I was using the PT on the trainer since I train indoors 5 to 6 days of the week and only 1 day outdoors (typically). So it was instinctive for me to think that the PT would be used more in that manner and fill the PMC chart with a greater ratio to the one day of manual entry, but now that I have a good amount of time on the trainer I am getting a good feel for perceived effort as you guys stated and could be consistent with that training load.

frenchy, thanks for reminding me that I think I do have a 12-27 9-spd cassette somewhere in the garage. That would definately broaden my range with that bike. I think I will go with that option first and then use the 10-spd when I go to the mountains since those are rare trips. I did purchase a 2nd wiring harness a while back and will go ahead and mount that on the 10-spd.

This was my blog entry for my last outdoor ride with the 11-23/PT hub 9-spd setup on a group ride.

 

[bigwillie013]

I know it's a bit off topic but I have to log some manual entries all year long as I'm doing many sessions on a tandem with my wife without the ability of ever getting power figures off it . I do my best in getting my RPE and HR match with a good estimate of Watts produced to make the PMC at least somehow being helpful.
But is there an option to discard the manual entries or any specific ride for the tables that WKO+ produces? Like a tick box or something that allows me to decide these files shall be summed up and these shouldn't?

Thanks for your help.

 

[daveryanwyoming]

...But is there an option to discard the manual entries or any specific ride for the tables that WKO+ produces? Like a tick box or something that allows me to decide these files shall be summed up and these shouldn't? ...

I assign the manual workouts a sport different than "bike" and then use the sports filter tab on individual graphs to include or ignore different workouts. For instance I'm not a triathlete and don't train swimming so when I do a ride on a gym ergormeter (which is pretty common in the winter and it even lets me track power) I label it "swim" Then in my graphs I either allow or ignor "swim" workouts by checking the appropriate checkboxes in the "sports" tab. In the newer WKO+ you can also filter graphs on a line by line basis instead of the entire graph. So I've got a weekly workout time bar chart that has one series of bars for total hours including all manual workouts, one for "bike" only which only includes actual PT rides, and one for "swim" only which only includes gym erg rides where I had power data. Mountain bike rides without the PT hub, cyclocross, skate skiing and such all go get other sport labels and get filtered appropriately.

The sport filtering is pretty important for the power histograms. Manual workouts show up as though the entire workout was ridden at the estimated average power. So if you include manual workouts in your power histogram you get huge artificial spikes at those average powers. Use the sports labels on your manual workouts and filter graphs appropriately and you won't get those big misleading spikes.


[edit]Actually the power for a manually entered workout is effectively the NP for the workout which can make it even more misleading since you'll estimate NP for TSS purposes and the entire workout will be saved as though it was ridden steady at exactly that NP=AP which isn't great.......

-Dave

 

[bigwillie013]

The sport filtering is pretty important for the power histograms. Manual workouts show up as though the entire workout was ridden at the estimated average power. So if you include manual workouts in your power histogram you get huge artificial spikes at those average powers. Use the sports labels on your manual workouts and filter graphs appropriately and you won't get those big misleading spikes.

-Dave

Thanks Dave, this is exactly the reason why I was asking. I saw the huge spikes and knew this is no good. I'll reassign my tandem rides immediately.
Thanks again.

 

[Alex Simmons]

Manual workouts show up as though the entire workout was ridden at the estimated average power. So if you include manual workouts in your power histogram you get huge artificial spikes at those average powers.

What I do is to double click on a date from the calendar to open up a new entry and simply enter ride notes.

Then from the calendar page I use the "Override Value" option (right click on that date) to enter a TSS value.

That means the day's ride appears on PMC but does not have any flat lined fake power, time or distance data associated with it and hence has no impact on MMP charts. The lack of time/distance data really isn't a big deal, esp if you are tracking TSS.

 

[Felt_Rider]

It's probably not as minimal as you think. You spent nearly four hours riding. You were probably going at least lower L2 across the entire ride so just as a swag say your IF was 0.6 and remember IF and TSS both rely on NP, not AP so it tends to give a bit more emphasis on the climbs and hard sections. So with the IF swag of 0.6 you'd rack up 36 TSS per hour ridden or roughly 144 TSS for the ride. And that's assuming you were in the low end of L2. Take that swag a bit higher with an IF of say 0.7 and you'd get ~ 200 TSS for that same ride.

Estimating TSS on a hilly group ride with climbs, descents, sitting in, etc. can be tough and as Alex pointed out the accuracy of your PMC will suffer if you estimate too many of your workouts. But you can still take a pretty good stab at it by being honest about how hard you worked, how you felt on the climbs, how much time you spent at the front on the flats or how hard it was to match the pace of the group. Those are all clues to how much effort you put out and should help you narrow down the IF and from it the TSS of the ride.


Good luck,
-Dave

You were not too far on your estimate above.
I used the PT on a group ride, which I would consider today a typical ride with elevation, distance, time and average speed. For the ride you estimated the effort was a little lower (being honest) so around 200 TSS is probably right.

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