You may have overhead people talking about
Strava at work. So what is it?
From the
about page at Strava:
Strava grew out of our own needs as athletes. With busy lives requiring much solo training, we missed the sense of camaraderie and friendly competition that drove us to achieve our best through training with others. We envisioned Strava as the means to put our workouts and races into context. We call that social fitness.
Today, Strava lets athletes all over the world experience social fitness—sharing, comparing and competing with each other's personal fitness data via mobile and online apps. Currently focused on the needs of avid cyclists and runners, Strava lets you track your rides and runs via your iPhone, Android or dedicated GPS device to analyze and quantify your performance.
The best thing about Strava is
Segments.
Segments are user-created, user-edited, and designate a portion of route where users can compete for time. When you upload a run Strava automatically searches it to see which segments you ran. You get added to the leaderboard for the segment and if you are in the top 10 then you get a trophy. The fastest gets a special Course Record prize. For cycling the prize is instead called "King of the Mountain".
Strava also keeps a record of your best 3 performances on net flat routes for a range of distances, from 400m through 800m, 1k, 1 mile, 2miles, 5k ... 1/2 marathon, 30k, ... marathon and who knows how high it goes?
They also have Challenges. I've done 3 running challenges so far:
1) Run 100, 150 or 200 miles in a month, with gels as prizes
2) Climb 10,000 feet within the month of May. Strava generally under-credited my runs by 20% or so compared to my Garmin GPS watch. Prizes for the highest climbers but not for the unwashed masses.
3) Run 100 miles between 1st Sept and 16th Sept. Finishers got a printed copy of Trail magazine, all entrants got a digital copy.
You can
Explore to find segments anywhere in the world, but popular segments around Hursley include:
Last mile along Romsey Road to the Church
Sparsholt Road Climb
From Hursley to the Sign and back
One mile descent in to Hursley via Collins Lane
Old Kennels Lane climb
Merdon Castle Lane climb (Violet Hill)
Climb towards Farley Mount held by a non IBMer, shock!
Pig Farm to crest
St Catherines Hill steps also held by a non IBMer by Al S-M has designs on this
Feel free to create more as you see fit, or come and kick my ass on the segments for which I am currently King. I'll get an email to let me know I've been dethroned :-)
