I've been meaning to write my thoughts on strava ever since I downloaded the free app onto my wife's phone Christmas Weekend.
I went for a 1 hour ride last night while my wife put Benon to bed. I didn't use strava, and the ride was quite unfulfilling, like it didn't count. The whole time I was pedaling it was as if it didn't matter. It was cold, windy, and super dark, it kind of sucked.
Strava has won a few awards as being the best new product in the cycling industry, it is a worthy winner. The program is simply amazing, being able to get all that data from your ride is very useful for most cyclists, I would guess even more for non racing cyclist. In fact, I would even go as far to say that strava will actually hurt the racing scene, or it could benefit.
Racing is competition, it is the reason most cyclists decide to race instead of just ride bikes for fun. With strava, you are able to make any ride competition. You feel good on a Saturday morning ride? Why not go to all your buddies best times for each climb and see if you can beat them? Why pay $25-$45 to go race, travel time, risk injury, in hopes of glory when you can use your strava and post it online for all to see how you whupped on your "fast" friend at a designated climb. Wait for the perfect, when you have a 20mph tailwind, then just wait for the metro bus to fly by and hop on.
Strava is genius. I haven't used it yet to test any records, maybe eventually I'll get a pt and garmin500 to do so, for now I plan on racing lots this road season, getting big miles so I can win some cx races next year.
If I have time this weekend, I'm going to try to convert my d29 carbon frame to ss. See if I can get the magic gear right. 27x15, 37x21, 32x18, or 26x16 are all close.
Thanks for the tip on Strava. I hadn't heard of it before, but I will check it out. You might want to read this NYT article to find out some of the limitations with using GPS for distance/speed measurements: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/the-problem-with-gps-watches-for-runners/
ReplyDeleteSteve
its not a big issue for cyclist even going under tree's your mph might be messed up half the time but Garmin hasn't lost a signal when riding under trees. For tunnel it will lose a signal but its a 50/50 chance, I go under the same bridge every day almost 4-5 times a day and i lose a signal maybe once or twice. Garmin has some features to fix elevation gain and a few other quirks for fixing data. But If you want data that you can build on it would be in a power-meter.
ReplyDeletei ran a singulator on mine...worked fine.
ReplyDelete