CliffordK

I don't go on a lot of group rides. But the rides I've been on have all been pretty non-competitive. I had Strava rolling while I was on a C&V ride up in Portland last weekend, but I don't think the group took any KOMs. I mainly had it on to track my mileage, and also have a log of where I had been. Unfortunately I managed to have Strava off for half the ride

nycphotography

Whaaaaaa wha whaaaaaa. I can't ride my bike because other people might be on strava, or might see me on strava, or might be faster than me on strava.

Whaaa people don't talk to me on rides anymore. It just has to be because of strava. No way it could be because I'm a tightass killjoy that sucks the life energy out of everyone around me with my incessant scornful judgemental pissing and moaning. nope. It has to be strava's fault.

nycphotography

All things are neutral things. Things are just facts. they exist. they, like all truths, are neither good nor bad on their own.

You put them into a context from which you can judge them, then you can decide if they are good or bad, but good and bad are judgements, and as such are both subjective and are only valid from certain perspectives.

PepeM

I like that he *****es about Strava turning everyone into a competitive ashole, and then this comes:

Alright then mate.

gecho

I don't think I've ever had Strava show me riding with another person while I was out on a club ride. But the clubs I ride with are not at all competitive.

What I used Strava for most was the heatmap feature as I enjoyed exploring new roads and colouring in the map. But I cancelled my premium membership this year and now use an offline thing for displaying my rides on a map. I now subscribe to Veloviewer (which uses Strava data) and have been using their Explorer feature as a game to see how many of the map squares I can fill in. Its a simple yet addictive challenge which involves a bit of strategy when planning routes. A shame the Strava developers lack the innovation to do cool stuff like that.

Scarbo

Look, it's not just me you're taking on but blokes like Jean-Paul Sartre who are far more enlightened than I. I should think that you really would rather not tangle with the likes of him. I'd call him in on this but he's rather buried with matters at the moment at a place called, Montparnasse.

nycphotography

Can't forget Kant too.

Scarbo

Kant?

I'd rather read Proust.

nycphotography

I'd rather not read any of them. Everything they knew could be summaried with a couple pages of bullet points, but since lot of em never had more than half of everything figured out, they obscured the inconsistencies and parts that didn't fit with reams and reams of circular prose. If I ever can't go to sleep, 2 pages written by any of them will do the trick in about 5 minutes.

My favorite question for anyone trained in psych: Which of the great psychologists / philosophers of history actually found the whole truth?

02Giant 

Strava thread, the new waving thread.

gecho

It can be both since you can lookup on your flyby who didn't wave at you.

nycphotography

The answer is Pavlov. Which really sets them off

Darth Lefty 

I wish I had a club for Strava to screw up

GeorgePatton

I think alot of people cheat on Strava and post times impossible to make on a bike. Especially when you look at their profile and their times and see an average of 12mph and then all of the sudden one augment they go 70mph on a bike.....ya right.

CliffordK

There are quite a few MTB riders that commute to a ride location, do their ride, then let Strava keep running as they return home. And, forget to crop the ride (and snag a few KOMs along the way). I'm not sure it is cheating, but rather just not thinking about what they're doing.

I'm really not quite sure how I could cheat on a ride. E-Bike?

Fast rolling start, but that is all part of the game.

Wind? I've hit a few windy segments, but I'd rather just do it without wind. Otherwise, I set my own PR impossibly high.

There are a few segments that get crossed. I saw one where a descent jumped to a nearby ascent. Again part of the game.

One local KOM segment is held by a Garmin with 5 second granularity to its readings. Then again, that could make someone win or lose a segment.

prj71

canklecat

Mostly I see GPS errors and people forgetting to close the ride before heading home in the car.

Strava allows cropping the start and ends of rides to eliminate vehicle speed errors.

GPS errors are unpredictable and can't easily be edited in the middle of a ride. Happened to me on every ride this week. It's common glitch with some some iPhone OS's this year.

Sy Reene

Is there a stava-based black market yet for iPhone OS hacks that intentionally manipulate GPS data?

I suppose manually entering a wheel circumference of 500cm into my garmin unit won't work?

gecho

Digital EPO: smash your Strava times? by cheating | road.cc

>edit: seems the site mentioned in the article no longer exists, but there are almost certainly alternatives

billyymc

This is just the tech equivalent of throwing a dart at a map. Honestly this tech generation thinks they have thought of new things when in many cases they've just thought of a different way, often a more complex way, of doing something old.

I gave up Strava and MMR after just a short trial of each. I got nothing from them. I ride as fast or as slow as I want. I turn where up roads that look interesting, often in lieu of reaching my intended destination. It leads to some great rides. Last week I did a 10 mile stretch on fast smooth dirt roads without a single car passing me, simply because I turned left where I had originally intended to go straight.

I'm mainly a solitary rider, but I did just join our local club. Haven't done a ride with them yet but I get the impression that very few will care about Strava.

jefnvk

I've done it before. Not to improve my time, but to splice multiple segments into one ride (my phone occasionally stops my tracking app when I take a picture). Upload to Strava, download the GPX, and then you have all the data in plain text that can be tweaked to your heart's content and can be reuploaded manually. It'd be child's play to write a script to take all the time stamps and tweak them downwards, say 10%.

daviddavieboy

Thanks I just choked on my b'fast burrito then coughed and a piece of the xxx hot sausage went up my nose. Obviously Stravas fault. From your attitude we may be brothers.


Where I live there were a pair who would follow one another at a slow pace and then then hammer on a segment. Some of the fast guys here were really upset. Especially when the culprit would tease them. I think he did it mostly because the fast group in question were quite cliquish and were quite rude to outsiders.

rubiksoval

Nailed it!

luddite_68

This is interesting. From the perspective of a newbie trying to get into shape, I started using my fitbit blaze to track my rides. It maps my ride on a GPS, gives me a graph of my speed & HR with averages, tells me amount of time in what HR zone and calories burned based on my age, weight, height, sex & BMR. It then pushes the calories burned above my BMR over to My Fitness Pal where I enter all my food. My primary goal is to loose weight and improve my cardio fitness and I am using the CICO method.

Then I downloaded Strava. It also hooks into MFP. I started seeing segment times. I'm not competitive as I am an overweight newbie and don't really care how fast other people ride segments (although there is some entertainment value to it). However, what started happening is that I would go for a ride on a windy day or hit traffic lights and my segment time would decrease. It made me feel like I had somehow slacked that day. Then I would catch all the lights just right or most of my ride would be down wind and I would feel like I killed it. Neither were necessarily true. Also, from what I can tell, Strava does not use my HR, BMR or any other factors specific to me to calculate calories burned. When I'm only riding 10mi for an evening ride, I don't typically eat back calories burned from exercise (although I do on longer weekend rides), but I still would rather see a more accurate number.

So after using Strava for a few weeks, I went back to the fitbit for tracking my rides. As I progress in my riding endurance, I may go back to Strava to track my performance, but for now I find the fitbit works better for me.

bruce19

I use Strava as a tool to track my own progress during a season. When I go on club rides I turn off the Strava in my mind and just ride with the group. Seems to be working for me.