IBP INDEX

What is IBP index?

The IBP index is an automatic valuation system that scores the hardness of a mountain bike, road bike, hiking or running trail.

This index is very useful to know the difficulty of different trails by comparing them.

It is very important not to confuse the difficulty of a trail with the effort that will take us to realize it: an IBP index of 60 will be a very hard trail for a debutant, normal for someone with a medium preparation and very easy for a professional.

  Suffering or efforts of a trail = fitness + race pace + climatologic conditions + IBP

The index is obtained by analyzing the latitude, longitude and height data registered by a GPS device. The distances done in the different sections of ups and downs (1%, 2%,3%,4%,etc..), the total ascended and descended meters, average ratios of climb and descend, the mileage of height and the ramps’ distribution are taken into account.

Applying a standardized mathematic formula you obtain a punctuation between 0 and infinite. This punctuation is 100% objective because it doesn’t take into account subjective values such as climatology, the fitness or the race pace.

The system detects automatically how the trail has been made. Therefore, the difficulty index that is going to be obtained will be followed by the following abbreviations: BYC for cycling trails, HKG for hiking trails and RNG for running trails.

It is also possible to obtain de IBP index of a trail drawn in a map manually, as long as the trail points contain the height. In this case the index will be followed by the abbreviations DRW. However, the index obtained this way won’t have the same reliability, due to the precision mistakes when marking the points or altitude mesh’s mistakes.

Information retreived from 
http://www.ibpindex.com/index.php/en/