Alpine ski; lifts, heart rate and fitness/relative effort, Garming watch vs strava

[Tristan]

This message is about logging a ski activity on Strava and the many problems I encountered.
I have used Strava for all sorts of activity and sports tracking; running, hiking, biking, climbing, swimming, walking, workouts, etc.
I am a frequent skier but never logged on strava, this year I decided to try the "supported" Alpine Skiing" function out.

The first two weeks I logged my activities using my Garmin Fenix 5X watch and it worked well. The transferred data was correct and the lifts weren't included in my total distance. However, my relative effort was between 5-15 every single day. These were days where we skied on average 40 km. Intensity varied but a RE of 8 compared to 32 for a 4 km light jog. When I changed from measuring using heart rate to "How hard was this activity" it suddenly jumped to 100-250. This didn't give me any useful insights into how my fitness changed during these 2 weeks, really disappointing because I like using the feature and now it is either downhill for two weeks or an insane peak. 

Today, I went skiing again and used the strava feature instead of my phone to see if there would be changes and it was even worse. The distance counted includes the lifts which makes it even more inaccurate and pretty much useless for any insights. If this is a feature Alpine skiing, meaning downhill skiing, and is "supported" it should work properly. 

Why is this happening, how do we go from here and what are my possibilities?
Thanks

[Jane · Accepted solution]

Hello @Tristan 

Thanks for your post and sorry to hear you encountered some issues with your ski recordings.  When you record skiing with your Garmin device, we are able to remove the ski lifts because of the way Garmin formats the file.  This isn't the case for all recording devices however.  We have an existing feature suggestion on how we might enhance how we display ski activities on Strava.  You can view it here, and we would welcome your vote (kudos) and any additional comments you might have.  

In regards to your relative effort scores - we calculate relative effort by looking at how much time you spend in each of your heart rate zones.  We assign more points to higher zones.  For this reason, longer activities done at a lower intensity may have a much lower relative effort score than shorter activities done at a higher intensity.  

I recommend going to the HR zone distribution graph on your activities and do a comparison across activities.  This may give you insight into the difference in your relative efforts scores.   For example here's an activity done mostly in HR zones 2 & 3:

 

A similar length activity done mostly in zones 3 and 4 would have a much higher relative effort, even if the activity length and distance is similar.

Click here for more information on understanding your Relative Effort

I hope that information is helpful - let us know if you have more questions.