Ride Detail

Opening a Ride

Click any ride from your week view, calendar, or ride list to open the full ride detail. You can also ask: "show me my last ride" or "show me Saturday's ride."

Route Map

If your ride has GPS data, a route map shows your path. You can zoom, pan, and explore the route. The map uses Mapbox for detailed satellite and terrain views.

Metrics

The ride detail page shows everything your device recorded:

• Distance — Total distance in your preferred units (miles or km)
• Moving Time — Time actually spent pedaling
• Elevation Gain — Total climbing in feet or meters
• Average Speed — Moving average speed
• Power — Average and normalized power (requires a power meter)
• Heart Rate — Average and max HR (requires an HR monitor)
• Cadence — Average pedaling RPM (requires a cadence sensor or power meter)
• Calories — Estimated energy expenditure
• TSS — Training Stress Score for the ride (from power data, or estimated from heart rate)

Understanding Power Data

Power is measured in watts and comes from a power meter — a sensor built into your pedals, crank, or rear hub. It measures exactly how hard you're pushing, regardless of wind, hills, or terrain. It's the gold standard for tracking cycling effort.

Power meters are a separate piece of hardware. They're not built into most bikes or head units. If you don't have one, that's totally fine — RideTool works great without power data. You just won't see certain metrics.

What requires a power meter

• Average Power / Normalized Power (NP) — Won't appear without a power meter
• Power-to-Weight Ratio — Needs both power and your logged weight
• FTP (Functional Threshold Power) — Your hour-long max sustainable power
• Power categories (Recreational, Trained, Competitive, etc.) — Based on power-to-weight

What requires a heart rate monitor

• Average / Max Heart Rate — Requires a chest strap or optical HR sensor paired to your head unit
• HR-based calorie estimates — More accurate than speed-only estimates
• HR-based TSS — When you don't have a power meter, RideTool estimates TSS from heart rate using the TRIMP formula

How TSS is calculated

RideTool uses the best data available, in this priority order:

1. Power (with or without HR): TSS is calculated from Normalized Power (or average power) and your FTP using the standard TrainingPeaks formula. This is the most accurate method.
2. Heart rate only (no power): TSS is estimated using the TRIMP method (explained below).
3. No power or HR: TSS cannot be calculated. The ride will show zero TSS. Consider pairing a heart rate monitor to your head unit.

TRIMP — how heart rate becomes TSS

TRIMP stands for TRaining IMPulse. It's a well-established method from exercise science for estimating training load from heart rate when power data isn't available.

The idea is simple: how hard was your heart working, and for how long?

Here's how it works:

1. Heart Rate Reserve (HRR) — RideTool calculates what percentage of your heart rate range you used during the ride. If your resting HR is 60 and your max is 180, and your average HR on the ride was 140, that's (140 − 60) ÷ (180 − 60) = 67% of your heart rate reserve.
2. Exponential weighting — Harder efforts don't just cost proportionally more — they cost exponentially more. Riding at 90% of your HR reserve is way more stressful than riding at 50%. The formula accounts for this with an exponential curve, so a hard 1-hour ride scores much higher than an easy 1-hour ride.
3. Duration — Longer rides accumulate more stress. A 3-hour ride at moderate effort scores higher than a 1-hour ride at the same effort.

The result is a TSS number that's comparable to power-based TSS — a 90-minute moderate ride might score around 100–140 TSS from heart rate, similar to what you'd expect from power.

What requires a cadence sensor

• Cadence (RPM) — Some power meters include cadence. Otherwise, you need a standalone cadence sensor on your crank arm.

Elevation Profile

Below the map, an interactive elevation profile shows the terrain of your ride. You can scrub across it to see elevation, grade, and other metrics at any point on the route.

Source Badge

Each ride shows a badge indicating its data source — Wahoo, Strava, Garmin, or FIT upload. If the ride came from an original FIT file (the highest quality), you'll see a .fit badge. See Data Sources for more on what this means.