Interval analysis

Bhima

I use SRM Win and Golden Cheetah for analyzing my rides but today I forgot to press the interval button and so am having trouble analyzing a set of 10/11 minute intervals.

I essentially want to analyze each time I went round a circuit which takes ~11 minutes to complete. If I could somehow split each time I go round into a seperate "ride", another file or have them recognized somehow as an "interval", this would be ideal so I could look at the power data for each lap.

In Golden Cheetah, the "find best intervals" tool is good but it's failed to isolate the exact parts of the ride i'm trying to look at. I don't necessarily want to find my "best 11 minute" wattages as such, i'd just like to look at the actual intervals/laps, which I can find by looking at the speed - a fast descent is the "end" part of the circuit and is a 30s recovery time before I hit the hill and start the next interval (at FTP).

Possible? Do I need WKO+ for this?

deal

Dont you have any elevation data?

doyler78

If you are more accurate than the GC at finding the intervals then why don't you just manually markup the file. You don't have to use something automatic if you can do this yourself better. It's simply a tool. If it isn't finding your intervals then it suggests your pacing may be somewhat off but you will probably find this out when you do markup the file.

In GC to set an interval go to the ride plot and find where you want to start the interval from and where you want to end then left click your mouse at the start and drag (while still left clicking) until the end of the interval and then stop holding the left click. This will highlight your interval. In the bottom left of GC you will see the intervals section and the bit that you highlighted will be added to the bottom of the list (which should your one and only item as you don't have any intervals). You can right click over this and do various things including zooming on it (which may be useful just to make sure you have it just right), delete or rename it to something more informative.

If you can easily see the intervals then you can mark up the intervals all at once in the ride plot my simply shifting a lef clicking each section of the file where intervals start and finish. Simples.

amaferanga

That doesn't work on my version of Golden Cheetah (not an official release - build date 2nd May). The left click and drag highlights the part of the ride, but nothing is added to the interval list.

doyler78

amaferanga wrote:

That doesn't work on my version of Golden Cheetah (not an official release - build date 2nd May). The left click and drag highlights the part of the ride, but nothing is added to the interval list.

I'm using Gareth's 6 June build off here:

http://goldencheetah.stand2surf.net/

Are you sure you have the intervals set to display ie the arrow turns 45 degrees downwards? If it points straight across then you are hiding the intervals.

It adds them to the bottom of the list so if are you displaying the best efforts ie 5 sec, 30sec power bests on the ride then it will appear right at the end of that list and will be named something like

Selection#1 (all from memory but pretty sure that's right).

I'm not sure when it was introduced however I recall a lot of discussion on this feature at the start of the year so my guess it would have been in a May build.

In any case it definitely works in that build linked above.

doyler78

Sorry should also have said I'm using the Windows builds so if you are using Mac or Linux then I can't say for any certainty what is available on those builds.

amaferanga

I was using the May 2nd Windows build from the same source, but I've just installed the latest Windows build (7th June) and I still can't get the intervals appended to the list. The intervals are shown as I have peak 5s, 10s, etc., but left clicking and dragging on the ride plot does nothing other than highlight and zoom in on that part of the ride. Not sure what you are referring to when you mention the arrow - I can't see an arrow anywhere. Do you mean the + and - signs?

doyler78

amaferanga wrote:

I was using the May 2nd Windows build from the same source, but I've just installed the latest Windows build (7th June) and I still can't get the intervals appended to the list. The intervals are shown as I have peak 5s, 10s, etc., but left clicking and dragging on the ride plot does nothing other than highlight and zoom in on that part of the ride. Not sure what you are referring to when you mention the arrow - I can't see an arrow anywhere. Do you mean the + and - signs?

Sorry I would be much more help if I was at home as I could knock up a few screenshots however I'm at work and can't do it from here.

If you can see the intervals list and it lists 5s, 10s, etc peak powers in the ride plot when clicked then you are definitely displaying the intervals list so no need to worry about that. When I left click and drag on the ride plot and that section of the ride plot is then highlighted this is automatically saved to intervals at the very bottom of those peak powers list and you just right click over and you can do various things to it such as zooming, deleting, renaming, etc.

I can do some screenshots this evening if you can wait if that would be helpful or you could ask over on the golden-cheetah-users google group if you would like to get it sorted a bit sooner.

amaferanga

TBH it's not something I need, but it would be interesting to know why it won't work on my version of GC. Screenshots would be good, but don't worry if you decide you can't be arsed

doyler78

OK here goes.

Here is the interval selected and the generic application derived named displayed in the intervals section.



Here is that interval renamed.



Finally this screenshot shows what the interval display toggle looks like when it is set to not display any intervals.



Hope that helps.

amaferanga

That's interesting because I have just installed the 2010-06-06 build on my laptop at home and it doesn't look exactly the same as yours. On the intervals window I still get +/- sign as opposed to the arrow and the highlighting still doesn't append the selection to the interval list.

doyler78

I was beginning to doubt myself so I just done Help -> About GoldenCheetah and it gives me this build information:

Build Date: June 7, 2010 09:20:02

If yours is the same then it may just be the way that it displays in my version of windows which Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

If you are using the same build on me then I would log it as a bug on the GC list as it clearly is supposed to do that or I woudn't be able to do it.

Bhima

Aha! Thanks for the detailed instructions. I've just managed to sort it out... Is it just me or is there nothing in the help/documentation about using shift+click to select data? I had no idea you could do that!

However, I only just realized today that you can get a free trial of WKO+ from the website so i've been trying that out and it's so much easier! All you have to do is select the data, press CTRL+R to create a new range and you're sorted! (Though, when I click on a range, it doesn't give me Norm Power & TSS for intervals shorter than ~5 mins - is this normal? They would be meaningless figures, but i'm intrigued nonetheless...)

WKO+ seems to be more detailed/accurate with the graphs but GC is easier to work with overall. Is it worth getting WKO+ for the whole long-term analysis advantages it seems to have over GC (even though I currently can't work out how to use them. :?)?

Bhima

By the way, GC uses some very odd terminology:

xPower (watts) - Normalized Power?
Relative Intensity - IF?
BikeScore™ - TSS?
Daniels Points - ?
Daniels EqP (watts) - ?
Aerobic Decoupling (%) - ?

I've always assumed those top three are NP, IF and TSS and my experiences riding have somewhat confirmed this, but the others baffle me! Anyone?

doyler78

Bhima wrote:

By the way, GC uses some very odd terminology:

xPower (watts) - Normalized Power?
Relative Intensity - IF?
BikeScore™ - TSS?
Daniels Points - ?
Daniels EqP (watts) - ?
Aerobic Decoupling (%) - ?

I've always assumed those top three are NP, IF and TSS and my experiences riding have somewhat confirmed this, but the others baffle me! Anyone?

NP, IF & TSS are trademarked by Training Peaks, the owners of WKO+ software, therefore it could only be used if licensed from them. GC as an open source product couldn't do that without Training Peaks allowing them to use it without charge. Bikescore, etc are basically a variation of NP, etc with only minor changes to the underlying formula which make little difference to the overall image presented (though Dr Phil would disagree no doubt). Dr Phil Skiba licenses this freely on a not for profit basis so GC is fine in using. He has his own software which uses it too which is not freely available hence why it is only available on not for profit basis.

More here:

http://www.physfarm.com/bikescore.pdf

Aerobic Decoupling is championed by Joe Friel and it is rather contentious. Info here:

http://home.trainingpeaks.com/articles/ ... friel.aspx

Daniels points is something the orginal creator of GC found in a training manual he was reading and it came from another sport, perhaps running, IIRC. Anyway there was a discussion about out on the GC google group before it was added. There is very little elsewhere on the internet on it so I wouldn't plan on getting much detailed info but essentially I think just treat like the others. The only thing is that it isn't based around 100 base points so a direct comparison with other metrics is a little more problematic.

amaferanga

Just got the interval thingy to work - I need to press shift while left mouse clicking and dragging.

doyler78

amaferanga wrote:

Just got the interval thingy to work - I need to press shift while left mouse clicking and dragging.

Just re-reading my first post I didn't mention the shift bit so I'm sure that didn't help. Anyway glad you got it working.

I notice that late last night pages for doing this were added to the GC Wiki so looks like there must have been a fair few who didn't know about this feature.

Anyway here is the wiki for anyone interested.

http://bugs.goldencheetah.org/wiki/goldencheetah

Bhima

Yeah, cheers, I just noticed that too after re-reading everything!

So simple, yet so complicated!

liversedge

I think the left click and shift-left click functions should be swapped round. Would me much more intuitive. Will raise a feature request to get it swapped.