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.
