Lost Kit #11: How quitting Strava made me a better cyclist
It was cold in the lanes at the weekend. I love autumn with a bad student’s optimism anyway, and I especially love it when cycling. Not just for the swollen, waxy rosehips and the stripped hedgerows – mindful of cars, I appreciate that they’re easier to see around at this time of year than when they’re in their spring excess – or for the neat rows of Kentish apple trees which tumble their crop over the cycle paths, practically asking to be scrumped. I love it because autumn is when I started riding properly. I got serious in the season of overshoes and neoprene gloves, when the mornings have a cold settling damp and the lanes a slanted light like thin honey. Once the leaves start to turn and the wind picks up – once a sudden gust at a farmhouse gate can knock you several feet sideways – I go, ah yes, here again. Back where it started.
All seasons are anniversaries, and therefore invitations to reflect on what has changed and what hasn’t. I’m probably a stronger rider than I was that first autumn – definitely a more confident one – but I’m also just one who rides differently.
When I started taking cycling more seriously, I wrote about how much I loved Strava. I liked the idea that my friends and I were part of one big, distributed team, doing different things but brought together across time and space by our combined effort.
While I still liked seeing people’s photos and stories, however, over time my relationship with the app changed. It wasn’t just that people used it to compare their efforts with other peoples’ – competition? In sport? It’s more likely than you think! – but that the pursuit of winning didn’t always seem to make them feel energised and excited. Sometimes, it made them watchful and mean. From glancing comments, I realised that some people take the time to check how long you’ve spent stationary on a long run; that they’ll notice your power meter temporarily registered 0 on a tough climb and tease you for putting a foot down.
Increasingly, I was put off by the logic of numbers, not helped by strangers at the velodrome asking about things like my average watts over a club ride, as if the wind and the pace and their 20kg on me didn’t make the question pointless as well as joyless. More, though, I was put off by the feeling of being watched. I’ve been watched by men before, had my behaviour noted and my phone number tracked down and unwelcome things sent to my home, so that now any hint of being under observation makes me itch. I started to be paranoid. Were people checking on me? When I felt slow and rubbish, did they notice, too? Gradually I turned off the integrations that upload activities from my various devices, and now I don’t log in to Strava at all unless someone sends me a link to a route I can’t get any other way.
Once I stepped away, though, I also noticed something more positive and useful. When you log a run or ride on Strava, the app gives you an average speed. In those early autumn days, I delighted in seeing this number be a little higher on some of my activities, and as my confidence grew I set private goals to hit a certain average on a certain route. Now, a few years in, I’ve come to be sceptical. When Strava calculates an average speed, it calculates an average moving speed. If you drop in at a café, or pause to tighten your laces on a garden wall, or even just get caught at a red light, it doesn’t include it. There are lots of reasons this makes sense: if the whole group stops for a puncture, people don’t want the time they spend shivering at the roadside to register against their overall pace. (See also: out-and-back cake rides.)
For my part, though, I’ve come to dislike this metric, for tactical reasons as well as administrative ones. For planning purposes, not knowing how long it actually takes you to ride a given distance is tricky: if I want to get back in time to see a friend or a film, it doesn’t serve me to not know my ‘real’ pace over a given distance.
More importantly – because even I can guesstimate how much I might be slowed by roadworks and route efforts – riding steadily has made me a better athlete. Cycling is a sport of energy preservation: it’s why racers in the pro peloton try to spend more time on someone’s wheel getting the benefits of aerodynamics. Aside from the Newtonian benefit of avoiding stop-start riding, learning to pace efficiently by tuning into the ebb and flow of energy is an important skill. (When I am dead and opened, you shall find ‘the first third should feel too easy’ on my heart.) I’ve lost count of the number of times a friend has told me they bonked on a run because they went out too hard, rather than picking a pace they knew they could reliably hold for the full distance, and I suspect sometimes it’s informed by what apps like Strava tell them their splits are. It’s tripped me up before and, frankly, my interest in unwrapping flapjack with shaky hands is low now nights are drawing in.
These days, I don’t always pay attention to average speed on a ride-by-ride basis, unless I know I’m on a deadline. When I do – for instance, to get a read on how I’m finding a similar course year-on-year, or because I’m feeling conspicuously more or less tired than usual – I look at my overall time. I don’t never come home exhausted, but I’m much better at knowing when I will. Besides, I figure if my legs can’t get me up a mountain at a given pace unless I take a hot five-minute breather on the safety barrier halfway, they can’t do it at all.