so I looked at the performance comparison of a KOM on strava the other day and noted that my ride compared to KOM was about 2sec behind at the 6secmark, by 12sec the KOM jumped out to over 1min ahead. in a span of 1 sec time(11-12 or whatever it was) the gap jumped 1 minute. wtf !!?? 
I has to find me some of them thar worm holes or I will never compete
In my area, some of my riding buddies and I have come across several KOMs that are not plausible. One belongs to me, but it is an obscure, out of the way place that nobody cares about. It says I went up a 3% grade for 2/10 of a mile at 33mph. Not. At least, not ME.
Another highly prized segment around my riding area that I held the 3rd or 4th fastest time on was recently taken by a guy that had just rolled out of a parking lot onto the segment and threw down an unbelievable average speed over a 1.5 mile segment with a heart rate averaging 125 BPM. This was the first 1.5 miles of his ride and the other guys that were with him recorded ânormalâ times through the segment.
Itâs clear to me that there are cases in which bogus GPS data is being used somehow. As an experiment, I went through a segment and paused my Garmin 500 during the segment and then turned it back on to see if that would fool Strava. It didnât. My segment showed up on my ride, but the time was calculated accurately and it noted âRest Timeâ of 35 seconds which correlated pretty closely to the time I had paused the Garmin.
Greg
we had a segment where the kom had a 33+mph speed in 20deg temps into an 18mph headwind over ~1.5miles. eventually it went away
My Garmin has shown me a few times running at a 2 min/mile pace for the first 1/4 mile⌠going up slightly uphill mind you. UmmmâŚya, I think it hadnât finished aquiring satellites. I have seen the data go a little wacky too when running or riding right under high voltage transmission lines. I assume one of the satellites gets dropped when that happens.
Just a note that the average speeds for very short segments are usually way off. They donât carry enough significant digits.
Possible explanations:
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GPS error. Loads of people use smartphones with GPS to log their rides. These typically do not have the best GPS chips & firmware. I know my phone makes some weird errors. But even Garmins (and similar units) make occasional errors.
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DigitalEPO. Software exists to modify and cheat GPX files. pathetic.
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unsophisticated cheating: i.e. Pacing behind your buddyâs minivan, to simply recoding your motorcycle ride.
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Strava / Google Maps errors. A local segment on th e shores of Lake Ontario is listed starting at 3,500m in altitude and climbing 500m over 4km. I havenât looked out the window but i doubt there are any mountains like that around here.
Yeah their software isnât very good at catching what is clearly impossible. Particularly on the run. A few months ago, I uploaded some workouts, including my clubâs Thursday night run and it showed that the guy at the top of the leaderboard had done an 11 mile ârunâ averaging 3:48 per mile. I just now checked and itâs still there. In fact, virtually every run segment I come across has something thatâs obviously a ride and not a run.
Youâd think by now someone would have added a check to automatically disallow (or convert into a ride) such ârunsâ
Strava use to be really awesome. Now itâs pretty much useless unless you keep everything within a group of friends. There are just too many people who are so mentally weak that they use digitalepo to get a digital KOM badge on their strava account. I donât even look at other peopleâs times anymore. I just compare my rides to my historical rides.
Yeah their software isnât very good at catching what is clearly impossible. Particularly on the run. A few months ago, I uploaded some workouts, including my clubâs Thursday night run and it showed that the guy at the top of the leaderboard had done an 11 mile ârunâ averaging 3:48 per mile. I just now checked and itâs still there. In fact, virtually every run segment I come across has something thatâs obviously a ride and not a run.
Youâd think by now someone would have added a check to automatically disallow (or convert into a ride) such ârunsâ
You can flag a run that was done as a ride and it will be changed.
But, agreed, youâd think if they looked at a 40-mile ârunâ with 3:25 min/mile average pace, they could have their software adjust that for you automatically.
I just flagged a guy last night who stole my run CR on his bike. I donât assume people do this on purpose, I assume they just uploaded their data as a run and never changed it before saving.
Yeah their software isnât very good at catching what is clearly impossible. Particularly on the run. A few months ago, I uploaded some workouts, including my clubâs Thursday night run and it showed that the guy at the top of the leaderboard had done an 11 mile ârunâ averaging 3:48 per mile. I just now checked and itâs still there. In fact, virtually every run segment I come across has something thatâs obviously a ride and not a run.
Youâd think by now someone would have added a check to automatically disallow (or convert into a ride) such ârunsâ
You can flag a run that was done as a ride and it will be changed.
But, agreed, youâd think if they looked at a 40-mile ârunâ with 3:25 min/mile average pace, they could have their software adjust that for you automatically.
I just flagged a guy last night who stole my run CR on his bike. I donât assume people do this on purpose, I assume they just uploaded their data as a run and never changed it before saving.
That wonât always work. I was running hill repeats once and passed my neighbor on his bicycle.
last night i saw the dude that was winning the âhalf marathonâ challenge had done something like this. i figured it was a ride as he completed his run just under world-record pace.
that or haile gebrselassie borrowed his watch.
Iâm traveling this week and managed to get lost on my run last night. I paused my GPS at a corner to ask directions but forgot to turn it back on for several minutes. When I uploaded the GPS file to Garmin and Strava, both systems just guessed my route during the paused time.
Oh well, I guess thatâs why they have races.
Strava use to be really awesome. Now itâs pretty much useless unless you keep everything within a group of friends.
Useless? Itâs still a great training tool regardless of what anyone else does. I think people get way too caught up in using it as a passive-aggressive method of competition. Race on race day.
Strava use to be really awesome. Now itâs pretty much useless unless you keep everything within a group of friends.
Useless? Itâs still a great training tool regardless of what anyone else does. I think people get way too caught up in using it as a passive-aggressive method of competition. Race on race day.
I can see your point, but I use TrainingPeaks, thus no real use for Strava as a training tool. There have been times where I was on a stretch of road and knew my previous time so I hit the gas, but it wasnât part of training.
Yeah, I use both, but Strava is just light years ahead of TrainingPeaks in terms of ease of use.
TrainingPeaks/WKO, etc, are useful if you want to customize analysis, but Strava just makes day-to-day tracking drop-dead simple.
I didnât really like strava because it didnât help me with working my weakness. The quadrant analysis and scatterplot from TP and WKO+ makes it so easy to identify your strengths and weakness. The TP interface isnât so bad, but WKO is awful. I know they are working on a major over-haul, however knowing TP they will charge for the update.
How do you flag a ride? Iâm sick of this 35mph KOM when te next closest rider is 26 and hes a legit bike stud.
if you are looking for ways to get more out of strava, check out veloviewer.com. it takes all the strava info and gives so much more data. You can see how far you are back from the leader on every segment and view rivals. I havent played around with it much, but it seems pretty neat so far.
Pretty sure you can flag things that look suspicious and mark it as âBad GPS data.â Iâve done that a few times. Itâll instantly remove the ride from the CR chart. You should probably not abuse this though.
Alternatively: Find a new segment to care about. When I finish a ride, I pretty much ignore 95% of the segments because they are just stupid and meaningless. I generally only care about a few 3-7mi segments and typically ignore the stupid .1/.2mi ones because GPS data can be wonky.
The thing that bugs me about Strava is all the people that create 10 segments for the same road. They largely solved this with the star feature and ability to hide though.
I didnât really like strava because it didnât help me with working my weakness. The quadrant analysis and scatterplot from TP and WKO+ makes it so easy to identify your strengths and weakness. The TP interface isnât so bad, but WKO is awful. I know they are working on a major over-haul, however knowing TP they will charge for the update.
The thing I like about Strava is that it makes it super easy to look at how you perform over a certain segment over time. I have a segment of road that I do my 4x10s on and there is a segment for each way. All I have to do is select the segment and look at all my results and see how my power and time have progressed over the year. This is very valuable in my mind. I also use Golden Cheetah but it isnât as easy to look at multiple rides on the same segment. It is just another tool to use in conjunction with Golden Cheetah, TP, or WKO.