Power reading too high on downhills?

[flahutewannabe]

Still wondering about whether my PP is calibrated correctly. Another windy ride today (I think it's been windy since receiving the device) and I'm still feeling a disconnect between PE/HR and the watts displayed. During my 28 mi O&B ride today seemed like power was much higher than PE/HR would warrant when on downhills, and on some other sections into the wind. In particular, watts went up at 8mi, 15 mi and 21 miles where my effort and HR went down. Also saw some watts reported that seemed way high for the way I was feeling.

BTW, just coming off some nasty URI crud so the last part of the ride I was pretty wiped and limped home (despite not putting in any real efforts beyond z3, with PE/HR for most of the ride z2.

PP is set to dynamic smoothing, no smoothing on the Garmin.

I did run check calibration and it suggested some changes that lowered avg and NP, but to avoid complicating things I did not accept the changes yet.

What further tuning of the profile might be appropriate?

[Velocomp]

Your overall wind speed looks balanced for this very windy ride. That's a good thing.

I do see the watts "bumps" on the downhills, but in all cases they appear because you're riding downhill into huge headwinds.

It this point here is no reason to make adjustments to your profile. Until you have a shorter out-and-back ride, on a less windy day, I would leave your current profile in place.

[flahutewannabe]

Once again, thanks for the quick response, John. Looks like it won't be until later in the week for less windy/rainy conditions here so I'll do another calibration ride then and report back.

I know one of the downhills was into a headwind, but again HR and PE both seemed like I wasn't working anywhere near as hard as the PP indicated. And I'm pretty sure given the prevailing wind direction (graphs below from weatherunderground.com) that the bump at 21 miles had fairly direct tailwind. But that's not what the track in Isaac is showing if I'm reading the graph correctly.

4-28 weather.gif (13.21 KiB) Viewed 2730 times

I'm also going to see if I can borrow a PowerTap wheel and capture that data on a separate Garmin just to help me better get a sense about power levels and how variables affect it. Right now I'm wrestling with my gut vs the data PP is reporting.

Thanks for your patience in working a non-techie through this new experience.