Relative CSS on the Navigator

The Crickles Navigator now has two new tabs: Relative CSS and Relative profile. These enable an athlete to compare their cardiac stress and its component with other athletes over the period defined by the date range (which currently defaults to six weeks).

Relative CSS ranks athletes on Crickles by total Cardiac Stress Score over the chosen period. Athletes at the high end may wish to consider whether they have built adequate recovery into their training plans, especially if they find themselves consistently accruing more cardiac stress than peers.

The obvious reason why one athlete’s total cardiac stress can be higher than another’s is that they’ve simply done more activities. However, it may also be that their activities are on average longer and/or done at higher intensity. Both duration and intensity can be explored using the Relative profile analysis. This comprises two density plots. The first chart shows the distribution of duration of the activities in the period. The green area plots this for the selected athlete, while the blue area shows this for the rest of the athletes in Crickles (excluding the athlete selected): for example, if there’s a large bulge of green over to the left of the blue area it will indicate that the chosen athlete does more short rides than the other athletes.

The second chart on Relative profile is a similar plot for intensity. This chart also has a dotted red line to highlight rides where cardiac intensity exceeds 100. This isn’t a “magic number” but large differences between the green and blue areas to the right of this will be indicative of how frequently athlete activities (in green) reach the highest cardiac intensities compared to activities of the rest of the Crickles cohort (in blue).