Feature Highlights of the January 2012 Site Update

We've completed our January site update! While this update contained mostly back-end improvements and bug fixes, we have a few goodies to let you know about. Thanks again for your patience during our rather long downtime. We are always balancing down time, data integrity, staffing resources and customer demand, and we try really hard to perform updates with minimal disruption, but sometimes we just have to go offline.  I thank you for your patience as we work to improve our products for you.  Here's what you can do with TrainingPeaks now:

rTSS, IF, NGP and EF on the File Viewer for Running

We've added the ability to view rTSS, Training Stress Score(tm) for Running while viewing the workout details graph. Highlight a section and see rTSS computed for a particular segment.  You can also see Normalized Graded Pace, Intensity Factor, and Efficiency Factor as well.  NGP is particularly useful as it is essentially the pace you would have maintained if the grade was flat and you removed stops. For example in the workout shown below, which was slightly hilly, my overall average pace was 12:23 min/mile, which includes a few stops I had to make.  However my NGP was 10:49 min/mile, a much more realistic number that correlates better to what I actually performed.

rTSS is very sensitive to elevation changes, so be sure to use the Elevation Correction feature in order to get the best possible elevation data. Note you'll have to have used a GPS device on your run to take advantage of the elevation correction feature.  You'll also notice we expanded the File Viewer to be wider, covering the navigation icons in order to squeeze every pixel possible so you can see your data easier.

Attachments in nightly email

You'll now receive any attachments your coach adds to a workout as an actual email attachment in your nightly workout reminder email.  Doesn't sound like much, but this will make it much easier to get any sort of documents your coach has included for the upcoming workout.  For example, your coach might attach a PDF document of a stretching or plyometric routine, or perhaps it's a Word document containing some pre-race nutrition ideas, maybe recipes. No matter the document type, you'll get it easily now in your daily email without having to login.  Perhaps you didn't know we supported attachments to workouts? Click the paper-clip icon on the QuickView to attach any document you'd like, as shown below:

Elevation Gain/Lost, Planned vs. Consumed Calories and USDA update

We can now display total elevation gained/lost by week, by sport, on the Calendar.  This is a useful metric to gauge how much climbing or descending you've done for the week. Thanks to user requests, we made this available as soon as we could (I'm talking about you @thematthart :-)  To enable this new metric on your Calendar's Week Summary, click on your name, Account Settings, select the Calendar & Layout tab and then the Workout Summary Options tab, finally, drag the Elevation Gained metric to your "In Use" column.

We're also now showing Planned and Consumed Calories in the weekly summary. Before, we only ever showed consumed calories.  This should make following your meal plan a little easier to see.  Lastly, we updated our default USDA database to the latest release, ensuring you are getting the best and most accurate nutrient information possible.

We've improved a lot of our calculation methods, especially with regard to average pace/speed calculations to ensure the best possible analysis of your data.

Looking ahead:

Most of January's development effort won't actually be seen until Feb and March, but I can't wait to show you what's coming. Enjoy the new features, and never hesitate to send us your feedback.

Thanks for your support!

-Gear, CEO

Comments

[Chris]

Awesome job! An idea for the next upgrade: the ability to put in weather conditions (rainy, windy, snow etc). Keep up the great work

[Caroline | free fundraising website]

Is there any version for Iphone?

[trainingpeaks]

We do have an iPhone app Caroline, check it out here: http://home.trainingpeaks.com/products-mobile/trainingpeaks-for-iphone-ipod-ipad.aspx