Strava Review

Like any self respecting obsessive hill runner I have a clever clogs gps watch, in my case a Garmin Forerunner 405, to record all my runs on. It records my location, the route I've run, my running speed and, vital when running in the hills, my climb and descent stats. And ever since I've had my garmin I've been very happy to upload all of my runs from the watch to 'garmin connect' on't t'internet so that I can analyse my running stats until I'm blue in the face, look at my height profiles and generally impress myself with my miles run/feet climbed per day, per week, per month and any other per something or other I feel inclined to look up. It fantastic..... 

Or so I thought..... 

Until I got introduced to Strava.....

Strava is a free internet service that does pretty much everything that garmin connect does but with a few added extras and, most importantly, prettier and bigger route maps. And as people who know me well will attest, my initial impressions and opinions of things I know very little about are often inaccurate, biased, unhinged, rubbish and generally way, way off beam. And my first impression of Strava was that it was crap! Of course my initial impression was largely influenced by me not quite understanding exactly how to use it and for a while not being overly bothered to find out. But now that I do know (more-or-less) how to use it, would you believe it,  I'm starting to like it. 

Strava is used by runners and cyclists alike and, if you want to get all geeky (and I do) you can even record your running shoes/bicycle used for each run/ride. These are the sort of statistics that I can't resist and with a quick couple of clicks of the mouse I can see that my current running shoes have done 271.8 miles.    Where Strava though beats garmin hands down is that it has a "segment" tool which allows you to isolate a particular part of your run (cycle route) and save it. These segments are usually hill climbs and, because the segment is saved to the main Strava server, each and every time that you (or anybody else using Strava) runs/rides that segment your times are compared and little league tables begin to be created. This segmenting has taken off big style on the cycling front with nowadays quite ferocious competition developing on well used cycle hill climbs and/or descents. Its getting increasing use for running too although, if you live in the sticks like me, I suspect there will be less Strava users around than in perhaps more populous places.

So for instance on my run tonight I ran all the way up to the trig point beside Warrendale Knotss from Settle and I've now set this part of the run as a "segment". At present I'm top of the leader board for that segment but, there again, I'm the only person who's run it and to date I've only run it once whilst using Strava. As I run it again each run will be added to the league table which obviously gives me lots of incentive to try and pb it, and thereby (in theory at least) making me push myself all the more. Should any other Strava using runner run that route (however unlikely that may be in this neck of the woods) that too will be included. Clever eh?

That said there are a few problems with Strava; my run this evening for instance on garmin connect showed the climb to be about 1,200 feet but the self same run on Strava rather ridiculously showed the climb as being over 1,600 feet, some 400 feet higher! This isn't always the case (my run from Sunday was longer and higher and Strava only exaggerated the climb by about 100 feet on that one) but clearly its not ideal. Also Strava will automatically create segments for you on runs and, until you suss out how to delete these, this is jolly, jolly annoying! Its also irritating that when you forget to turn on your watch and want to enter your run into Strava manually it won't let you put in the climb height, only allowing the run distance.

All the same, despite these faults, the segments make it really unique and a great training aid. More importantly your routes can be displayed very impressively: