Yesterday afternoon I completed a fairly tough event ride on Zwift, and felt I did extremely well; I exceeded my expectations. I was pretty sure I got a breakthrough, and in fact Xert updated the ride description that Garmin posted to Strava to say I had a breakthrough. (It says, “Breakthrough: NEAR | https://www.xertonline.com/activities/xb9kwiluchbuhxpa |”)
The graph of the ride certainly suggests one, doesn’t it? Why is it just showing a best-effort when I clearly went well above my predicted MPA? (Every time I think I understand this system, it does something to throw me for a loop and I have to come back to bug someone for help!)
Here’s the part of the graph where I thought I got a breakthrough:
So, was it a breakthrough or not? Why is Xert telling me two different things? (Am I being punished for daring to think I understood how this worked? )
Maybe a bit too short for a true breakthrough to happen (officially the required minimum is 5 secs, but AFAIK that doesn’t always applies).
A NEAR breakthrough is often a fakethrough in disguise.
You may want to have a look at http://baronbiosys.com/flagging_activities/
From the horse’s mouth: Ignoring Near Breakthroughs
Another application of the flag feature is to ignore a ‘near’ breakthrough. If you feel that the near breakthrough wasn’t a true maximal effort and feel that your signature declined erroneously, you can flag the activity so that the near breakthrough is ignored. The near breakthrough will no longer appear on your progression chart and your signature will not see a reduction from the activity.
Neither had I. I learnt it the hard way.
As a rule of thumb IMHO every time there’s a blank (actually white) medal on your XPMC you’d better have a closer look at that activity and then decide if it needs to be flagged or not.
Ciao.
OK I’m still confused, sorry Lorenzo. Xert is saying my last breakthrough was January 1st, where my six minute power went to 401 W. But the near-breakthrough (as you’re calling it) on Saturday says my six minute power went to 407 W.
Beautiful!! As you can see, your training load (black line) has gone up meaning that you’ve improved. Xert predicts this improvement. Your 6 minute power has gone up since your last breakthrough. But you now get a real breakthrough and it happens to be just below what is predicted. Hence, it is a near breakthrough - lower numbers than expected but higher numbers than before. You can see that in your chart.
Ok. Back to my original point (which went with my original question)… I still think it’s odd that it would update my ride on Strava to say that I had a breakthrough and then not say anything about a breakthrough on Xert itself.
But once again I guess I understand a little better now. Until my next question… Thanks again
Near breakthroughs are still “breakthroughs” and certainly something to feel good about in the end, especially when many times you follow up with a real breakthrough soon afterwards.
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