Guest Article: An Open Letter

Dear readers, let us take a break from the almighty Tour for a few minutes. I am the least qualified Velominatus to introduce an open letter concerning Strava as I’m too shame-based to post my rides to Strava. I have a Garmin on the bike for no particular reason, ok, maybe to occasionally see how fast I’m descending or to know the grade of the climb I’m presently suffering on. At some point it will ask me what should it do with all these weak-ass rides taking up Garmin memory. Oye.

@Artie has authored this open letter (our first?) and like the Rules themselves, @Artie is just trying to improve our cycling experience in this digital world. Thanks @Artie

VLVV, Gianni

Dear Keepers of the Cog and Curators of the Rules,

The Tour de France this year has had a few memorable moments. Cavendish moving behind only Merkx in Stage victories, Froome’s new descending style, and of course the bike-less sprint up Ventoux come to mind. But there has also been a subtler addition to my viewing this year. More and more cyclists in the peloton have been sharing their ride data on Strava. For example, scrolling down my Strava feed after a late afternoon ride, I now notice Greg Henderson’s data, and see that yesterday he was in fact descending like a madman, just as Rule #85 and Rule #93 implore him to do. This supplement to my Tour Digest bridges to a theme my friends and I have often discussed and I thought it time to share our thoughts.

Our over-connected world has reached a point, where the dubitability of any cycling accomplishment has become (almost) strictly correlated with that said accomplishment appearing on Strava. Did you climb Sa Calobra during an early spring training camp? Did you reach the summit of Galibier before your best friend? Did your race up Alpe d’Huez with such a murderous intent that locals began to talk about the ghost of Pantani that appeared one late August afternoon? Perhaps… but without a Strava log to prove it, who knows! But, it is not the virtues or vices of using Strava that I wish to comment on; many people use it and some don’t. Instead it is a much more mundane aspect of the app that has been the subject to our diliberations, i.e. the naming of our tours.

The default name Strava gives each activity are more than boring; “Morning Ride,” “Afternoon Ride,” or “Evening Ride.” “Morning Ride” sounds like a Monday morning commute to work. “Afternoon ride” is what I do with my girlfriend, when she wants to go on a picnic in the park across town. “Evening ride” is an excursion with my Holland Bike to the bar down the street and to the left. The blandness of these names do absolutely no justice to a properly ridden tour. If you keep your bike perfectly matched, kit in shape, and tan lines razor sharp, is putting at least a little creativity into your digital cycling life too much to ask?

I say that a proper tour deserves a proper name, and a proper name should – like all things – be casually deliberate. A quick comment about the ride would be a basic but satisfactory name, e.g. “Hard push up to Chamonix”. If you are racing, the name of the event would be fine; “Paris-Roubaix” is far superior to the default.  A more sophisticated name would be that of the song you started to whistle while pushing through the most difficult bits of a climb. Such a title has a lasting effect. Each time those you rode with heard the song, they would be reminded of the pressure their legs felt as you climbed, and doubt would be further seeded into the moral.

I wish to avoid a long digression into the art of naming, although the horizon is large and well worth exploring. But, I do wish to assert that a cyclist who has gone digital should maintain his digital cycling life as he does his real life. Calling an afternoon conquering cobbles on your way back to Liege “Afternoon Ride” is a digital dirty chain; it is unacceptable, but luckily easy to fix.

Yours Kindly,

Arturo

Hamburg, Germany

Artie

View Comments

  • Strava.

    Ugghh....

    There IS such a thing as Too Much Sharing, and shit like Strava, iphones, and name-your-geek-assed-GPS-flavor-of-the-fucking-day all combine to take the fun out of just riding your bike.  Who gives a shit how fast you sprinted to the last mailbox?  Who gives a shit if you won the KOM at the local Tuesday Night World Championships for the eighth week in a row?  Who gives a shit about how many watts you produced during the latest ass-kicking that you put on all of those other nine-to-fivers who showed up for the Saturday morning ride?

    Oh, I guess most of y'all do.

    Heavy sigh.

    Look, here's the thing:  Cycling isn't complicated.  Air up the tires, put on your stuff, and just ...well.....ride.  For my money, all of the digital chest-pounding that's going on is just fucking tiresome.  Nobody wants to ride these days and just enjoy the miles.  Instead, everybody has turned into a techno weenie-wagger, sporting a conspicuous bulge in your shorts to prove what a badass your are because, well STRAVA says so.

    Well, good for you.

    Now - here's the truth: Nobody fucking cares that you spent $500 on the latest Garmin so that you can know with NASA-like precision how many watts it's costing you every time you coast so that you can snap a selfie with your iphone and upload it to your facegag page while you're on some 60 mpg descent on your aero gravel gravel - the one with the accents that coordinate so well with your $500 Sidis and $250 Oakleys.

    Look - it's not like I'm some fucking Luddite with a grudge against modernity.  I like sealed bearings and streaming Netflix as much as anybody.  And carbon fiber isn't exactly the devil.  So, call me crazy, but I get on my bike to Get The Fuck Away from being constantly connected. I guess it's down to having started racing in the mid-1980's, when the coolest gadget going was one of those Avocet 20 cyclocomputers, which gave you your speed only to the nearest .5 mile per hour.  Now THAT was some fucking technology right there, boys and girls.

    If I'm really diligent, I'll wear my heart rate monitor.  And I have a new-fangled Cateye computer that tells me how far I rode and my current/max/avg speed while I was doing it, and......that's about it.  Can't download the data from my HR monitor and computer because they don't have that option, and I wouldn't own one if it did.

    Data?  Fuck data.  Why do I need a GPS to tell me how steep a grade is?  You either ride it, or you don't.  You're either fast, or you aren't.  Who fucking cares, as long as you have fun?

    I'll tell you who fucking cares: Nobody.  Well, except maybe you.  And the other Strava donkeys.

    Here's a novel idea:  Try unplugging all of the gadgets, and leave your smartass phone at home.  And go out and just ride your fucking bike.  No telemetry. No watts.  No gradient info.  No map that shows you how far to the next city limit sign so that you can go all Mark Cavendish on their assess and make it look oh-so-spontaneously casual while blowing up the Watt-O-Meter and setting a new Strava record.  Try to remember what it's like to just ride the bike and have a good time.  Most of you will fail, because, well, you're more interested in being entertained and showing off than you are in being really connected to what's all around you.  But maybe somebody will Get It, and realize that Strava is just one more thing that doesn't do anything except distract you from a very simple sport.

     

  • @Marshall Ellis

    Strava.

    Ugghh….

    There IS such a thing as Too Much Sharing

    Well you got that bit right.

    Your rant says more about a lack of imagination if you think that's all people do with Strava and bike computers.

  • @ChrisO

    @Marshall Ellis

    Strava.

    Ugghh….

    There IS such a thing as Too Much Sharing

    Well you got that bit right.

    Your rant says more about a lack of imagination if you think that’s all people do with Strava and bike computers.

    For a guy who thinks there is such a thing as too much sharing that was sure a big bit of sharing!

     

  • @ChrisO

    @Oli

    This.

    First thought - troll.  Second thought - knows a bit about bikes.  Third though - troll on a bike.

    Hopefully Strava has a Troll category/leaderboard.  Probably a premium feature....

     

  • @RobSandy

    @Marshall Ellis

    I disagree with your rant. But I will defend your right to rant whenever you want.

    Go for it.

    I almost feel like having a rant about the lack of ranting just to give us something to rant about.........

  • @Teocalli

    I'll have a different sort of rant about Strava...

    I've just signed up for Strava Premium - my British Cycling membership gave me a 60 day free trial so I thought it was worth a go. My reason being, I would like to monitor my training and progress over the forthcoming training year (which for me, starts today!) and it seemed as if the additional HR-based analysis offered on the premium version would help me do this.

    My main hope is that I can track my weekly training stress/intensity to see how hard training weeks affect me in the long term.

    It seems as if the Strava tool which does this for me is the Suffer Score - from what I've read this is similar to the TSS used on Training Peaks, in that it measures how hard a ride or workout is. So far so good.

    However, when I looked into the detail, the HR zones that Strava had guessed for me were miles out. I had to change them all drastically. Now, does every strava premium user who wants to use their Suffer Score do this? My guess is not, which means the whole Suffer Score premise for most people is flawed - it's calculated from HR zones which are completely wrong.

  • @RobSandy

    I guess the problem is similar to those on Gym Machines that HR zones by age are calculated from age/life "norms" but when you then take those norms into an athletic community then that community is on the ends of the norm curve and so the stats are bollox.

  • @Teocalli

    It's especially annoying as it seems on the face of it quite a useful tool, but probably mis-used by 90% of the people who have it.

    I'm interested how it works to compare long, easy rides with short, intense workouts. We'll see.

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