These two sessions were from a few months ago, so before I had the Suunto. I’m using this to illustrate how power and cadence can operate differently in a session.
This is two sessions both of 2km each. Both have four intervals of 500m where I go “easy, moderate, hard, easy”.
In the first session I try to do this all at roughly the same cadence of 24-25spm for a total of 218 strokes.
In the second I vary cadence along with power, so 22spm, 25spm, 28spm, then 20spm for a total of 219 strokes.
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The first session took 8m 57s averaging 146w while the second took 9m 16s averaging 135w.
Now Suunto would likely give similar distance for these two sessions as they are roughly the same stroke count and the overall average cadence was about 24spm in both sessions, but the four intervals in each session are different!
Whether or not it would say 2km doesn’t matter too much as that can be edited. What Suunto cannot do is show the power/watts graphs I show in these sessions, and would show a “constant speed” for both ignoring the different power fluctuations.
Basically, you can make it so “totals” are right, but nuances of the session cannot be captured. People who do interval work like tabatas would understand the importance of seeing the overall power graphs of the session.