The first two VR “races” were a nice distraction from the current situation and a good motivation for training. Despite the teething troubles, I quite enjoyed them. VR3, however, was something else entirely. It will be the last virtual race in which I participate, and it may have turned me off from Ironman entirely. Let me elaborate.
The most obvious issue is the Strava debacle, and that is indeed a serious problem. As someone who’s training platform of choice is Tacx, your own website indicates that there is now no way to sync my activities. You made the problem worse by waiting until the last minute to announce the change, leaving many of us with no time to test an alternative platform or approach. This unnecessary delay directly contradicts the Sport Heroes web page linked in your FAQ which specifically says “please check your device is correctly set up by doing a test activity beforehand.”
Losing Strava connectivity wasn’t the only mistake you made with VR3. You changed the rules! With VR3, activities more than 1km longer than the specified distance are not counted. I only found out about this change by seeing a tweet hours after frustratingly trying to figure out why my 14 mile bike ride was counted. I can’t see any reason for this rule change, and at any rate it should have been prominently advertised, not buried several pages into the race instructions.
My bottom line on VR races: With all the hoops required to sync activities, and without the freedom to simply go for a ride or run that’s a slightly longer than the required distance, these events are no longer worth the hassle.
But that’s not my only issue. As a senior software engineer that’s worked on web platforms for decades, I find Ironman’s response to the Strava problem disgraceful. Strava is acting perfectly correctly. As a Strava user, I want assurance that when I link a third party platform, my data is only being shared with that platform. I was happy to give Ironman access to my Strava activities, but under no circumstances do I want the various corporate clients of Sport Heroes to have access to that data. I applaud Strava for taking what steps it can to ensure that integrity. (And I recognize that Ironman could easily turn around and sell the data that it gathers to corporate clients, but at least Strava is doing what it can.) If Sport Heroes is unable to segregate Ironman data with a separate API key, then quite simply their underlying architecture is pathetic. Next time do better due diligence in selecting a technology partner. And more importantly, stop with the misleading and mendacious social media campaign. The banner posted on Sport Heroes web pages linked from your site, which reads “We are currently experiencing issues with the synchronization of your Strava activities. Waiting for Strava to fix the technical issues on their side, we highly recommend you to connect another provider as this could take a while to be solved.” is nothing less than an outright lie. It is Sport Heroes that needs to fix their technical issues.
At this point the whole affair has left such a sour taste in my mouth that I doubt I’ll be participating in any Ironman events, real or virtual, in the future.
