Strava

@Chalfie

I'm going to smuggle my car into RP and do hotlaps at 3am...

I’m proud of my Euston Road underpass KoM, with an average speed of 53.5 mph.

Especially as I’ve never cycled through it, rather the high buildings there make GPS readings variable.

Who would alter their files to win KOMs yet make them obviously bullshit?

Twats, and the reason is that it's easy to do and easy to get away with. Some sites list the number of KOMs someone has. It'd be obvious what they were doing if it listed the details of those KOMs but it doesn't, and so people game the system to look like billy big balls.

I'm guessing Strava will have a crack down at some point in the future, either by smoothing the data (which would deal with GPS glitches [whether real glitches or faked]) and then some deeper inspection on the people with silly average speeds over longer segments.

I'm not bothered as the data is so unclean, and I don't care where I am on segments, I only care about my own comparisons and those are slightly dubious given the disparity in my own rides.

@Chalfie has, or had, the KoM on Chalkpit Lane. Which is impressive given it was in my car and I was driving.

and so people game the system to look like billy big balls

Honestly it's one of the things I will never get, it's like a really shit cheat in a video game without any actual payoff.

by smoothing the data

Which I'd be super happy about. Basically, I'd like to have a 'snap to road' option. It's not incredibly hard to implement from a software perspective (in hindsight, after the activity has been completed) considering the map data is all out there, and it would make the data a lot more reliable, not just for KOM purposes.

One of Strava's problems is that if you trim your track inside Strava (because you left the GPS on for the subsequent car/train journey) then none of it appears in any segment leaderboards.

(If you trim outside Strava and upload that track then it's all fine.)

So, unintended consequences mean that rather than missing out on the genuine leaderboard entries for the bits they did ride people will leave the non-bike sections in and just ignore them.

Haha, no wonder I could never get that KOM :P

Oh I see! Not owning a car, this is not a problem I've had - more the opposite, where the end of the activity contains some walking. I don't care much about that though, so I've never looked at cropping inside of Strava before.

I'm going to glue my Garmin to a rocket...

I seem to remember you saying "shall I try and stick to a believable average?" (or words to that effect.

I've NEVER been tempted to go up a hill in a car to steal a KOM.

I BULLIED you into doing it for the lols. Starva needs more lolz.

http://www.ukrocketman.com/tech/review_etrexgps.shtml

A moped however....

(a) it worked
(b) the GPS loses lock on the ascent under the high acceleration
(c) the GPS re-acquires lock at apogee, so a nice 3-dimensional plot of the flight can be obtained,
(d) the GPS does show the approximate altitude reached by the rocket, which can then be compared against the barometric altitude logged by the rocket's onboard altimeter.

if you trim your track inside Strava (because you left the GPS on for the subsequent car/train journey) then none of it appears in any segment leaderboards

I don't think this is true. What does happen is when you trim in Strava (which I do most rides because I don't entirely trust the privacy zone feature) is that it starts recalculating segments and it takes a while to do so; in the interim the ride vanishes from leaderboards, but then comes back once it's recalculated.

I gave up looking at absolute leaderboards long ago, it's all about being second quartile in the male 43-45, 70-80kg, today only filtered leaderboard.

@DiscoPotato and I did this, minus the car but didn’t think about it till our third lap...

All the central bridges are data glitches for the top 10. The running ones are even more impressive than the cycling...

Is there a site/app which shows you local segments with the fewest total attempts/indivudual ‘athlete’ attempts?

Not for me, obvs.

Hmm your friend could see if Veloviewer can do this...

Fair enough, I was going on my ailing memory, will check things more carefully next time.

So regarding your previous comment on GPS glitches etc., have a look at this segment I just stumbled across when checking my morning commute:

https://www.doogal.co.uk/StravaSegment.php?id=8419504

1 Giancarlo G. 00:00:03 355.3km/h
2 Don C. 00:00:04 266.5km/h
3 Loïc B. 00:00:06 177.7km/h
4 Emdad R. 00:00:09 118.4km/h
4 Ian W B. 00:00:09 118.4km/h
6 Joey J. 00:00:11 96.9km/h
7 Henrik P. 00:00:12 88.8km/h
8 Darren N. 00:00:13 82km/h
9 Gavin S. 00:00:14 76.1km/h
9 Ashley P. 00:00:14 76.1km/h

To be fair, that's the worst I've seen in a while...

There used to be a guy around where we lived who drove to the club ride, but said he rode in. He parked in a supermarket on the outskirts of town (or a housing estate, or at the station - he mixed it up so that you wouldn't catch him in the act). When you looked you could see the pauses on the ride when he was unloading the bike.

Anyway, he used to pick up KOMs left right and centre on his way to/from the ride, but pootle around the ride itself at about 26kmh complaining about the speed.

He got busted when, during the winter, someone realised that his Strava showed the ambient temperature being about 24deg on the fast parts of his rides, but 6deg on the slow bits. The most remarkable thing was when you realised he'd done the Festive 500 in his van at around 20mph. He was a family man but his loved ones must have had a lonely Christmas whilst he was out crawling the back lanes in his van for 9hrs day after day.

Or maybe they were the lucky ones...

That just seems really sad, I don’t get it.

The festive500 isn’t that hard it’s the time commitment at that time of year...

That's so incredibly pathetic that it's just sad to read.