Originally Posted by mschwett

for the method he mentioned you don’t need to know the wind direction - the relationship is between power and speed, it’s either “harder” or “easier” depending on that relationship…

Originally Posted by RChung

Yup. I was always confused by rides classified by average elevation gain per mile -- I was more concerned by the length and difficulty of the hardest climbs during the ride, not the average. Eventually I realized that with power and speed data, I could tell when I was putting out a lot of power for not much speed (and vice versa) and that was a closer measure of difficulty, and it didn't matter so much whether it was hard because of the slope or the wind: they scale differently, but they're both hard so I converted winds into "equivalent" elevation. I also looked at converting slope into wind, but the pattern there was harder to discern.