Yesterday I went with a morning ride with TDC, which felt relaxed, before going for a ride with LeCercle in the evening. This group has a high level with many of the cyclists riding thousands of kilometres per year.

Yesterday I wrote about how groups that are large enough can cater to fast, and slow people. LeCercle feels like a smaller group of highly engaged cyclists who ride regularly.

Until Genolier I was able to stay with the group comfortably. It’s when we hit the climbs that I lost a lot of time. I’m riding with a bike that is heavier, and I have a casesette that is more suited to London than mountains. Having said this, with other groups I climb faster than others so I am not using equipment as an excuse.

Meetup and Strava are two sites filling specific niches. Meetup is a dinosaur of the web. It dates back to 2005 when the web was still looking for a way to be sustainable, and thus, more fun. Meetup was good for people in big US cities, London and other metropolitain cities. If you lived in Bumbleduck nowhere it was not. (Intentional spelling)

Strava in contrast is a young company. It was created in 2009 and became popular among the cycling community for a while, before eventually including running, hiking and then climbing and many other sports. The point of Strava is that it is a social network for sporty people. Meetup is a social network for sedentary, as well as sporty meetups.

Years ago, when Strava was newer, and more appealing I eventually decided to pay for Strava because I wanted to support the project. I wanted to help make them sustainable. The same is true with Zwift. When both of them got VC funding I ended my subscriptions rather than renewing for another year. This was years ago.

For me, it’s simple. If we are paying for a site like Strava, be patient, and use our money to improve things incrementaly. Never forget that a paying customer is providing more value than a VC. A VC Investor usually wants to extract value, rather than inject it. A paying customer is an investor. The paying customer should be king.

A few weeks ago two individuals in a car yelled abuse at a group of us who were cycling. They were mad that a cyclist did not pull in for them to pass easily. At this point I thought “Despair is not sat on a bench as in the proverb, he is sat in a car.

Years ago, after yet another speeding fine when driving between home and a scuba diving spot, or vice versa I was flashed and I thought “expensive cars are a waste of money, because the motorway is rarely quiet enough to drive at the speed limit, let alone to speed. In effect you’re spending a huge amount on a machine that will see you stuck in traffic and grumpy.

Yesterday I arrived to the cycling meeting place by 08:07 and the Peak group were still there, getting read to set off. It was understood that I had planned to ride with the group and I was tempted to try. The issue is that I already rode quite hard with the Wednesday group and the Thursday group.

The other issue is that they were going on a 100km ride with quite a bit of climbing so I would have struggled to keep up. I was also not ready, food and snack ride to do such a long and physical ride.

Yesterday I rode with Group 2 rather than Group 1 with TDC. I believe I could keep up for a second time. I also believe that when you’re cycling hard three times a week it takes a lot of energy.My experience last Saturday showed that I was pushing myself too hard by riding by cyclists stronger than me three times in a week, especially after riding close to my max on Wednesday, Thursday and then Sunday.

For years I have used Sportstracker, and then Strava and Komoot and others. Whether I use one platform or another isn’t much of a concern. I can send my data everywhere. The question is whether I make that data public, private, or a hybrid compromise.

With Suunto and Sportracker I usually keep almost everything private because I can’t highlight zones that I want to keep private. With Komoot it requires cropping the start and end point to hide where you live. With Strava you highlight where you live, work, where friends live or work and then it automatically hides activities to and from those points. Specifically it hides the first 200 meters or more, depending on how privacy conscious you are.

Today on two segments, specifically I rode fast. I rode fast because I know them well so it is easy for me to assess effort without feeling drained, or at least not too drained, and then I slowed down to the speed of the group.

The rest of the time I was making an effort to keep up. I know this because today the ride was short but my legs feel pumped, as if I have been on a hard ride.

One of the strangest things, in my observation of other people, is that they dress as if it was warm when it was cold. They dress in shorts and t-shirts to walk in the mountains in spring. That’s quite absurd, given how the mountains, in April tend to be cold.

Others dress in shorts and a t-shirt to go running when it is barely above freezing and I find this behaviour absurd too. In theory you don’t need to dress if your body is going to be hot and sweaty after a quick run.

Yesterday I came across something interesting and frustrating. Apple watches don’t need to be obsolete, themselves, to be unusable. If you try to pair an iphone 8 plus with an Apple Watch it will refuse because the OS is two generations too old. I tried to sync with the Iphone SE from 2020 and I am also having issues. The OS is 18.x so it should work fine.

It’s not just the watch that has to be kept up to date. The phone has to be up to date with the latest OS as well. If it isn’t then if you reset the watch for any reason, it becomes a brick. It seems absurd to me that a device that costs from 200-1200 CHF could become obsolete so easily, that its usability could be so fragile.