tetonrider

guessing that's endurance (power) for you?

i've seen a bunch of cross files (my own and from athletes i work with). it's a given that we're going all-out during races (RPE), but power can vary a great deal. i have yet to see a file that approaches threshold for an hour, though i'm sure it's out there (something like a grass crit). most often it is a rider (or me) saying they're crushed but seeing mid-tempo-ish watts.

the lower the power, i find, the more technical the course...either loose or turns requiring lots of time off the gas. oddly, you would think that dismounts cause the drop in AP but 2 dismounts/lap doesn't cause that much of a hit.

out here, one of the rockiest/bumpiest courses makes for the lowest power due to a constant barrage of "a second here, a second there" where you can't apply power because you're getting knocked around.

assuming your head unit was recording the whole time, run your data through one of the hrTSS calculators. of course, geek that i am, i still like power from CX races, but hrTSS gives a better indicator of the overall hit. bet you'll see something much closer to a rate of ~90TSS/hour. if you don't see that and you had the low power, you were slacking.

on a tangent, i recently read an interesting article discussing how subjects were given a task unrelated to cycling (say, hand-cycling...i.e. with your arms) and then a TT on a stationary bike. they repeated it without the non-leg-intensive task.

although RPE was always the same, power output was lower after the hand-cycling. seems obvious, but the muscles in their legs would not have been taxed at all.

i think it applies to CX in that the little bits of running -- eSPECially for the typical cyclist -- cause RPE to go through the roof and power to be lower than we'd think. running is clearly not hand-cycling, but it's another activity that kind of skews our sense of RPE on the bike.