It’s not hard work

Those that work with Excel know that it’s not that hard to make a plot of a set of data points. So that was what I just did this morning with the world famous Endurance Nation set of “data”. I confess that I was a bit disappointed with it, since it only consists of about 20 data points, with 1/5th of it generated by one single athlete. Interestingly, this single athlete is also the person that subjectively decided about which races were successful or not, but I digress…

For those that are looking for an effort budget, which really means an energy budget, to race the bike leg in a triathlon, you would think that the average work performed would be the first candidate. As we know

Work = Power x Duration

If we define a reduced work (Wr) by scaling it with FTP, we’ll have reduced work as a function of IF

Wr x 3600=W/FTP= IF x Duration (h)

Figure 1 shows curves of constant Wr as a function of IF and Duration, along with a typical Power vs Duration curve.



Figure 2 shows the EN “data”, along the above mentioned typical Power vs Duration curve and the now shown useless TSS=300 curve. The thing that is curious about the “data”, and that a very small number of the readers of this blog might find interesting, is that it falls along a curve of constant Wr. So it would appear those athletes were all spending the same energy (scaled with individual FTP) during an Ironman bike leg.



Unfortunately, the reduced number of data points along with the subjectivity in picking the data set, renders this “conclusion” virtually useless. It is very likely that this constant-work hypothesis is just the result of this particular set of data points.