Can't decide if it is helping or hindering my cycling. Today I nearly threw up trying to beat a segment time, but the headwind was enemy today. Still at least I managed to get in the top ten.

Anyone else finding this is taking over their riding or running?

What's all the fuss?

Well Strava takes any GPS logged ride or run and compares your times to other strava users over set "segments". A segment can be a short climb or a long section or road. If you do a lot of riding on your own it gives you a target to ride against.

My Dad and brother wouldn't shut up about it so I downloaded the App and timed my run home from work. I can see myself getting to work very sweaty and out of breath, as you'll be constantly trying to beat your best time

I know - I've been using it for a while but (over the winter months) no one was using it - suddenly there's been an explosion of people in my area using it. The trouble is, as you say, you focus on a small part of the ride (Kessock Bridge being popular) and I've wiped myself out trying to get the KoM back - especially in adverse conditions. I'm not a climber either (being larger than optimal) which means I'm already at a disadvantage. On the upside, I ride all year round which means I'm more likely to be riding on a day when the conditions are favourable. Great app though - wonder how long it will be before Garmin buys Strava?

Cheers John, will try it out on Wednesday. I do a lot of solo training so this will give me a little more incentive to 'push on'

Anyone else using this now? I am following MRS.

One thing to be sure to do is anonomise youe start and end points. It is in the setting page. There have been reports, but they may be urban myths, of criminals checking out Strava and other such sites to target expensive bikes.

Targeting a 100 mile ride on Friday, should be a good day for it and I may even welcome a short rain shower at the end of the day as forecast.

It's becoming quite a sport to roam the area and "steal" segments - there's a very quick guy near me doing just that.

Interesting about anonomising - might do that though crime of any sort is incredibly rare.

As for rain, I'm so used to it that I'd miss it. Apart from wearing overshoes to try to keep my feet warm, I do nothing different.

I'm another one, only on the xc bike at the moment though.

Very addictive stuff, though I'm not 100% convinced on it's accuracy for some of the more technical off road stuff - though thats not what it was ever designed for!

Got a few local KOMs but some very fast lads round here apparently!

The accuracy on the road can suffer with GPS drift.

However this tool can help.

Excellent, so you can "adjust" that 10 mile ride to look like 15 miles in the same time, it'll be easy to get the quickest time!

Some great Strava tools:-
Add Strava tracking to your GoPro videos
More tools here, such as multiple map viewer is especially fun as you can see what pert of your local area you have ridden.

There's about 10 of us that own most of the local KoMs - lots of good banter on it. Mine are mostly flattish or short/sharp climbs - too old and heavy for the long ones

Anyone wanting to comprehensively thrash their best segment times month on month, i recommend being morbidly obese to begin with! Went out on friday with a chum and tackled Rhuallt Hill (a real bitch of a climb) and bested my previous by 30 seconds. Every week I get quicker as the flab comes off

Great work Matt, i am going the other way at the moment

Get on the pies Bockers!

www.garminsync.com is an easy way to transfer your garmin info to strava or run keeper. You just need to transfer one run to start with and subsequent runs sync automatically.

This may be something you've seen before but I liked it

Hitler Loses All His KoMs

That's a lovely piece of captioning work there..

I finally tried Strava for the first time today but my times were only mid-field

That's really funny MRS

Skinflint, you're only just starting on it son

Maybe just starting but I'm king of a small mountain
Now I just need to bomb it to stop anyone from nicking my place

I've got a couple of KOM's but that could be because the finish is in my living room

It is bloody addictive. I only do the running one but if ever there was motivation to run it would be stealing a KOM

Somebody's been through a load of local segments in a car nicking about 10 KOMs (or QOMs in her case) in the process.

Do these things sort themselves out? It happened 3 days ago.

I've nearly done it myself - not stopped the Garmin, and put the bike in the car after an event.

You can report the segment time if you have ridden it too and the poster is contacted to remove them.

I reported a couple of segments themselves that passed through sets of traffic lights as well as ones that started and finish at lights. Way too much temptation for people to skip the lights to beat their best time.

Yup - in fact Strava remove the segments - there's a little box to choose a reason. It happens quite often up here with MTBs strapped to cars still logging times.

There is some rather over-zealous flagging of segments as dangerous. There's one I do that's been flagged because it passes by a primary school. "Reasonable" I hear you say except that it's in a tiny village (collection of houses) that's only on one side of the road and there's a separate parallel road for the school itself and the segments either side of this one only have about 20 names in them - suggesting that the risk is incredibly low.

Talking of over zealous, somebody's flagged Streatley Hill as dangerous.
It is possibly the 4th best climb in the country.
No schools, traffic lights etc.
Descending is another matter but how can it be dangerous on the way up (heart attacks aside)?

Streatley Hill, ah I see what the problem is. If you look on google street view, starting from the bottom and move up the hill, there are cars that seem to reverse the whole way up the hill on the "down" side as well as traffic going up the "up" side

This app is depressing, Digital EPO!

FFS

Is that website not a urine extraction (as used for testing?).

Perhaps they could enable it when George Michael isn't in residence?