Working in remote tech support means spending a large part of my day sat at a computer. And if truth be told going a little stir-crazy every now and then, especially when I look out the window on a bright sunny day knowing my cycling buddies (the retired and self-employed ones) at that very second are climbing and descending some of the best country lanes the Peak District has to offer – life just ain’t fair.
So, as an endorphin junkie, most of my leisure time is spent out on my bike. And that’s where my cycle technology comes in. When I got back into cycling five years ago I discovered Strava, an app on your smartphone that tracks your route, mileage, elevation, average and maximum speed, heart rate and cadence (how fast you spin the cranks round). Not only that, but also calories burnt – an excellent idea if you want to lose weight. But Strava is also a community of thousands of cyclists, runners and swimmers, so if you want to you can compare your stats with other riders and even set-up clubs.
Another feature for the competitive ones amongst you, Strava records your time over user-defined “segments”. These are stretches of road, point-A-to-point-B that have leaderboards – the fastest rider of a segment being awarded a KOM or QOM (King and Queen of the Mountain). Not being very competitive (much) in 2014 I held all 3 KOMs for Curbar, Grindleford and Froggatt – in my age group. These are all Cat 3 climbs. That’s another feature – Strava grades the climbs according to standard categories of difficulty. From lowest to highest Cat 4, Cat 3, Cat2 (only one in the Peak District) and Cat 1 (none in the Peak District). There is one more – HC. An HC climb is so hard there are no metrics attached to it.
By logging into Strava you can go to “My Routes” and create a ride, which you can then download and put on your smartphone/cycle computer. The group I ride with use this very useful feature to create our Sunday ride routes which our members can then download so they know where they’re going – particularly helpful if they get separated from the main group.
I did upgrade to a cycle computer (Garmin, Wahoo, Mio) which you mount on your handlebars, but after several different makes gave up the ghost (probably because I was out in all weathers) I went back to the Strava app on my smartphone. When I first used a phone, transfer speeds to the Strava website were cripplingly slow, but nowadays they have improved vastly.
Moving on, my routine is to get into my cycle kit, turn on the strava app on my smartphone, grab the bike and head out the door. Now, with the auto-pause feature, when me and my cycling buddies get to the café-stop I don’t need to pause the app, which is great because I can set the app going at the beginning of the ride and just stop it when I get home.
One problem I did have the other day on a 132mile ride was it stopped recording after just over 100 miles. Fortunately, after I uploaded the ride info to Strava I spotted the shortfall and manually added the part of the route that Strava hadn’t recorded. I suspect the issue occurred due to lack of data storage capacity, so I think I need to delete some of the data on my phone!
Whilst Strava has many amazing features the criminal element of society has discovered it as a way of finding out where people live in order to steal their bikes (a carbon road bike can cost anywhere between £1000-£10,000+). Strava have implemented an optional radius around a user’s home to hide the exact location. However, criminals can look at a user’s routes and if the user approaches their home from different directions the crimainals can get a pretty good idea of the user’s exact location. Me? I always ride in the Peak District so I only ever return one particular way.
Another way to help avoid the attention of criminals who may be after your steed is not to list the model of your bike on Strava. Listing a Pinnerello Dogma F10 (£7-10k) is just asking for trouble.
Gone are the days when I record heart rate and cadence, but I do love investigating the data after a ride to compare my cycling buddies segment times with mine – again, not that I’m competitive, you understand?
There are also monthly and yearly total mileage stats (usually about 5,000 miles, for me) and my total elevation which is in the hundreds of thousands of feet.
I honestly can’t imagine going out on a ride without my Strava app, and in fact the Strava community considers that if a ride is not on Strava it never happened!
Now, after all this typing I think I need to get on the bike and clear my head, adios amigos…
Alex
Alex provides web support for Octagon Technology and their clients including hosting and domains administration as well as advice and assistance with WordPress installation, security and maintenance.
If you would like to talk to Alex about any hosting or WordPress matters, please let me know and I will ask him to contact you and answer your questions.
Kamila
General Manager
Octagon Technology Ltd
