Strava

For seasons, or even years I saw the Strava Elevation Challenge and I thought “I won’t even try this challenge, because I will fail”. This month I tried it, and I succeeded. Not only did I succeed to climb the 7000m suggested by the challenge but I got to 10,415m. I overshot by 4000m so far and I have a ride planned for this afternoon.

The ride I went on yesterday was 89 kilometres with over 700m of climbing. Around three weeks ago I went on a ride with 1600m of climbing. For every ride that I do with Tête de Course we go at least part of the way up the Jura, as is the case with LeCercle.

Yesterday I was playing with Strava Flyoveers and I tried to share the videos of flyovers but rather than sharing the video as I had wanted to do it shared a hyperlink to the activities that were already shared. I then tried to share via Instagram but the result was a pixelated mess with a line.

What is a Flyover?

A video flyover is a 3d video of the ride, hike or other sport that you have just completed in the same style as you see ahead of Tour De France Stages and others. It allows you to see the speed, altitude and landscape as a rider or hiker may see the view. Here is an example of a LeCercle Ride I participated in.

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.

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 I am resting. Yesterday afternoon I was planning to go for a bike ride with the easiest group and went with the hardest, after it was recommended that I do this. The result is that today I feel fine, but I’m still taking a rest day. Tomorrow I will have a physical 89 km ride with one thousand six hundred meters of climbing. I expect to be tired during the second climb.

I see people. I see them say that they have given up on wearing fitness trackers and smartwatches because they hate the tyranny of the device. I have felt an intense dislike for Apple behaves in particular. At the same time I have been playing wit Sportstracker for eighteen years or so. My fitness tracking habit is old enough to drink and old enough to drive.

This isn’t a post about drinking, or driving. This is a post about having a healthy relationship with your Garmin Instinct 2, your Suunto Peak 5, your Apple Watch SE, your Xiaomi Smartband 9 Pro and many other devices over the decades. it’s about wearing them, without displaying addictive behaviours. It’s about co-existence.

Yesterday I was trolled by three people on Threads because of a comment on dating culture on Strava. I said that for me Strava is about networking rather than dating and for it one person said she friendzoned me, and two others were hostile rather than commenting in a friendly reason. For these three incidents of trolling I deactivated my Threads account and I am considering deactivating my Strava account.

A few weeks ago Strava decided that it would add AI functionality to it’s app. It is for this reason that I decided to restrict which apps talked with Strava. Now Strava is doing the reverse. It has blocked access to its API so that other apps cannot use its own data.

This, in my eyes is short sighted. Strava is not the primary source of data. Garmin, Sunnto, Apple and others are. This means that if Strava makes it more complicated data from their platform, then they encourage people to bypass it entirely. It gives Garmin, Apple and Suunto to name but three device makers the chance to work directly with those that provide data analytics.

Two days ago Strava came out with their “Quick edit” feature that is actually nothing new. They claim that it will simplify renaming activities to get more likes but that’s not what the “simple edit” is about. It’s about renaming activities to train AI.

Some apps will call a run Morges Run, or Nyon Cycle or Gruyère walk but Strava, until now has called runs “morning, afternoon, evening or other. Finding old runs, with strava is very hard, if you want to find by location, distance or sport. This is despite them feeding their AI models since May.