Strava has a thing called Relative Effort; it's an arbitrary metric, developed from what they used to call the Suffer Score, and factors in time, difficulty and work to give a universal comparator of how hard you were working, regardless of whether you were running, cycling or swimming. For cycling, all I'm really interested in, the gradient of the road is factored in, as well as speed and duration - if you have a heart rate monitor on the go, that's included too.
Out of interest (and to gauge how reliable, and therefore useful Relative Effort is), I plotted the figures returned for each of the nine days of RAB. Brace yourselves, here comes a graph:
...which suggests there were five hard days and four easier days, and that the hard days were broadly similar, and the easier days were broadly similar... It also suggests days 1 and 8 were the hardest, with 3 and 4 the easiest. All of which I'd agree with. Maybe there's something to this Relative Effort lark...
