Strava Average Speed Slaves

Apparently I didn’t! I’ve seen a couple serious posts like this on a couple FB groups and responded honestly. No worries! :laughing:

Oh, after today, I can assure you there IS a wrong way to ride a bike.

Today at cross practice, I had an “interesting” remount. Caught my crotch on the back edge of my saddle. Instead of just giving up at that point, I hung on and flattened myself out so as not to fall off the back onto the wheel, and went into the next corner legs out, superman style.

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Personally I like to race on race day but if others find some form motivation through strava stats then why should that bother others?

Besides if everyone was properly focused and didn’t get distracted by social media such as strava then the competition would be much steeper.

Occasionally it’s fun to chase some speed or a segment anyway…

I’ve seriously considered doing this so I can see changes in power, speed, heart rate over time (months and years) with certain segments or workouts I tend to run or ride continuously without having to peel out the warmup or cooldown.

It’s just such a pain in the a$$ to go into TR or Strava and try to cut those segments out when I know I could just stop and restart the activity on the fly. Up until now, I’ve just been too lazy to go through the motions when I know it’s just a few minutes on either side of the ride or run.

Good to know there’s at least one

out there who doesn’t think there’s any legitimate reason to do it other than a good ego-stroking.

I had a friend mock me for the distance of my first cyclocross race because it was so short for 30 minutes of riding… had no idea of the difficulty or the course… but yeah… some people are weirdly competitive to try and make themselves feel superior.

During the trainer road sessions in ERG mode you could easily stick it in your highest gear and get massive distances for strava, but why bother… I quite like that it doesn’t show your wheel speed in the app, only cadence and power!

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there are some odd things done by folks out there, “its modern life Jim” – as mentioned one can block those that are not actually friends or just plain annoying (change privacy settings unless your into the challenges and segment placings ;-)) , for what its worth I think the best ones are those Strava rides with 30 photos in that are then shared on all Media feeds… the “look at me” brigade…LoL. Personally I like pictures of food best…:wink:

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You don’t care about their average speed, but they do.

The same way that some people track annual mileage and will turn themselves inside out in December to hit a certain mileage total others will do the same to hit a certain hours goal.

The same way that some people will do loops around their house to turn a 98 mile ride into a 100 mile ride.

The same way that some people will push the pace incredibly hard on the second half of a ride to hit a certain average pace

None of these things make a rider better or worse than you. None of these things make that rider a bad person.

However, in my opinion…

Being the guy who calls someone out for only riding 98 miles when they could’ve done 2 more miles and had 100

Being the guy who calls someone out for caring about an annual hours or mileage goal

Well, I think that’s the guy who has to, as you put it

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If I ride to the start of a TT it tends to be 3 rides on Strava - one outbound/warmup, one cooldown/ride home and one for the TT itself.

Not sure if that makes me a dick, but it’s a great way to measure how I’m doing over the same course throughout the year.

I could not record the commutes, but gotta get that ‘Cycling Distance Challenge’ trophy somehow :wink:

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You could create your own private segment for the course. You wouldn’t then need to stop and save each one individually, which I would imagine would be slightly annoying. :+1:

It’s more like you’re having a bit of a whinge. I recommend having a pint of ice cream and see if your mood improves.

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You sound a bit salty and I don’t understand why. There’s literally no reason to get upset over how other people tag and name their rides. Most of my friends don’t ride with power meters so average speed is the only way we can kind of compete with each other, and marking rides solo or group helps understand that average speed a bit better. I’ve met many new faster riders this year as my average speed has greatly improved from last year, so “noone cares about your average speed” is just you being bitter. Did some new local guy steal your thunder as top dog on the leaderboards?

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image

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Ah, there’s the word… “compete” with each other. That’s why you do it! :kissing_heart:

No, not bitter. I’m looking at it from a different angle to you. I don’t care one bit what others think of my often very slow rides. I’d never want to justify them, or make them appear quicker by stopping lower than where I started. On the flip side I’d never want to brag about a fast ride.

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What’s wrong with being competitive with other riders and friends? If you want to ride slow, ride slow, I never hold it against someone until they act like people riding faster are elitist or trying too hard or whatever. I never see or hear fast guys talking crap about slower riders, but I often see slower riders talking crap about everyone else.

I don’t ride to impress anyone, but if my results happen to get a bunch of comments or kudos, or get my friends to try a bit harder on their rides, I don’t see anything negative in that. We all boost each other’s fitness, and mentality. I’ve gotten more positive feedback this year than ever before and it helps me feel good about my performance and in turn makes me want to help my friends go faster, so we all help each other in a way. One of my locals that gives me positive comments also owns an LBS with a great group of guys on their race team and I may very well end up on their team next year because he sees me busting my ass and trying to help other locals improve.

Go have a beer and cheer up

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:roll_eyes: Missing the whole point of the OP.

This ain’t a gripe about “fast” riders.

Hard to miss the point of a pointless post, but I digress

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As a competitve runner, I will say there are plenty of benefits to tracking the workout in this way.

It makes it easier to see the specific TSS / relative effort for a workout.
Quick and easy HR data rather than having to go into web app and analysis by breaking it down.
Shows specific elevation gain/loss for workout.
Helps me track/count splits when doing workouts like 20 x 300m or something.

Personally, I don’t care about the pace on it and rather do it for simplifying tracking/analyzing training.

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I turned on the “Request to Follow” because I was getting spam follows and comments with nefarious links from Russian Pornbots

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My wife’s running group does this. Every interval is a separate Strava file. :man_facepalming:

I get what you’re saying, and agree, definitely makes for an easy way to track similar workouts… Though I’m not ‘advanced’, but rather more on the ‘semi-serious’ runner side, I much prefer to use a dedicated analysis suite (eg. TrainingPeaks) for analysis. But I get it, not everyone wants or needs to do this.

Just saying, the runners I know guilty of this aren’t necessarily doing this for the reasons stated above… They’re mostly fishing for kudos based on pace.

Looking forward to tomorrow’s Track Tuesday feed of 342 activities.

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