Segments

21 April, 2014 by David Johnstone

According to a recent survey, segments were one of the most anticipated upcoming features. Segments now exist as a way to gain deeper insight into a particular ride, and they will be used in the near future as a way to track performance over time. As a concept, segments are very simple. They are just parts of a ride, and are listed under the list of laps.

Segments can be created using the following tools:

  • Find intervals — Given an interval duration and the number of intervals to find, this uses power data to find segments with the highest average power in the ride. This will be more useful in the future, when there are ways to compare segments over time.
  • Find efforts — Given a minimum duration and average power, this finds all segments that are at least as long and with an average power at least as high. At the moment, this finds the longest segments possible, while still remaining above the average power threshold.
  • Find climbs — Finds all climbs given a height and minimum gradient. The minimum gradient is used to determine when the climb should start and finish, so it’s normally best to have it as a low number (the default is 2%).
  • Add selection — Adds an arbitrary selection, which can be entered manually, or made by clicking and dragging on the main ride chart, clicking on the power curve chart, or by clicking on an existing lap.
  • Split — Split the ride (or part of the ride) by time or distance into equally sized chunks.

What exists at the moment is only the beginning. Next up is the ability to save segments. Following that is the ability to compare segments over time (i.e., compare the average power of all three minute intervals). The ability to have segments created automatically based on GPS coordinates might also come. Something is also going to happen with laps so that they can be deleted and edited.

There have been a few other recent changes:

  • Coaches can now disable notifications for when their athletes’ upload new rides.
  • The power curve chart on the athlete statistics page now now works okay for the strongest users, where, when the chart is showing relative power, the user’s own numbers used to be off the top of the chart if they were more than 20% higher than the 95th percentile of Cycling Analytics users. This would have been a problem if, for example, your best twenty minute power was above 440W.
  • The Best Bike Split tool has been made a bit more bullet proof, so it shouldn’t be possible for it to get into a state where it is stuck saying “processing”.

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