What do you like and don’t like about Strava.

I have found it to be a great performance improvement tool. During the free trial I got hooked on the enhanced analytic tools. It is so cool to compare my segments to the KOMs to see exactly where I lose time. 

It has also motivated me to session segments. Prior to becoming a Strava addict I would just ride trials beginning to end and would never stop to repeat or redo sections. This has improved my execution on these trails and also my skills in general. 

I wish I was able to see my segment times during the ride. That way I could tweak my approach in between attempts.

I do not use it for navigation or trail finding. 

I dislike that Strava does not have some sort of smoothing to their tracks.

In my area, on my phone, sometimes the track will jump across the valley when a location ping is inaccurate.

I don't think its unreasonable for Strava to figure out that I didn't travel 1.6km in 30s...

Similar to the way I use it too (I also pay for it). I keep it fully locked down/private, only let friends follow me and don't allow it to aggregate my data.

If you want to get even nerdier the free Elevate add-on app is pretty cool too: https://thomaschampagne.github.io/elevate-docs/

I like to see my yearly ride time, hours, and distance, and I like that I can compare it to previous riding years. The route building tool is great for getting an idea of how long I’ll be out when doing a new route. 

I quit smoking and picked up bikes again around the same time and Strava was a huge motivator as I could visually track my health/fitness/skills improvements. I loved the stats and metrics as an ADHD information sponge.

Seven to eight years later I still love the metrics and insights but find it’s hard to turn off the Strava part of my brain and just simply enjoy a ride. Not that I don’t always enjoy riding, but I am definitely guilty of digging deeper than necessary just because a PR or leaderboard may be a potential. 

I don’t live near endless public lands or forest. We don’t really have illegal trails and if we do they’re side shots in neighborhoods so I don’t have the same concerns over pirate trails drawing heat.

I frequently use Strava for trail recon as any new place is usually hours away so I do my best to gauge if the ride is worth the drive.

I’m competitive to a fault with or without Strava. I find it to be a useful and enjoyable tool. 

I have found that my phone GSP is not accurate enough for Strava. I have heard that it can because several apps are trying to use the location and also because the refresh rate on phone GPS is not tuned for the types of activities like mountain biking. I have had much better luck with using the Strava app on my apple watch. 

This is a great opportunity to mention the Strava global heatmap and its effect on illegal trails. If you're using Strava, even if you set your ride to "Private" so only you can see your map, your ride will contribute to Strava's global heatmap unless you go to your privacy settings and turn off "Aggregated Data Usage." Here's a link that shows how to do this.

And if you think this isn't an issue, click this link and use the global heatmap to navigate to an illegal trail you enjoy. I bet you 10 to 1 that the trail is on the heatmap. Land managers and other trail users can and absolutely do use this information to locate and blow up riding spots. DON'T BE PART OF THE PROBLEM. TURN YOUR AGGREGATED DATA USAGE OFF IF YOU RIDE ILLEGAL TRAILS WITH STRAVA.

I personally love Strava because I love looking at the map after my rides, especially big dumb rides. It's cool to see how far I rode, and sometimes that's motivation enough to finish a big dumb ride where I'm cooked and otherwise over it. Also cool to see what friends are up to on my feed and be inspired to get off the couch. I use a ten-year-old Garmin Edge 500 and it works great. No touch screen or navigation but the buttons work, the battery life is great, it was $30 on eBay, and a Garmin is always going to be more accurate than a liePhone. But DON'T FORGET TO TURN YOUR AGGREGATED DATA USAGE OFF.

I don’t use Strava or any ride tracking tool at all, but please listen to Charlie on this. 3 local to me illegal trails that were absolute bangers got completely demolished by the parks department this spring. They literally dug up pieces of the trail, destroyed all jumps and drops, and fell trees across it in multiple spots. All because the trails were frequented by heat maps users that kept the glowing bright red on Strava. Turn that shit off.

I hate that Strava does not include elevation loss in the data analysis. I consider this an interesting/important metric and would prefer to not leave my device going when riding lifts or using a shuttle. Garmin records and produces the data in Connect so it seems like its a pretty specific choice. Its a small thing but has bothered me since day 1. Everything else is perfectly adequate for my needs. Remember people stay off the Robots Kill List, make the lurkers and fun police earn it and TURN OFF YOUR AGGREGATED DATA USAGE.

I like to see the calories burned, so I can double that in consumption of beers that afternoon. It's a slippery slope.

Bigger the ride, the more fried.

I liked the logging, time ridden, routes etc, but ended up uninstalling it. 

The way strava turns every ride into a race (either against others or yourself) was a big downer for me. I realised that I would enjoy a ride, sit down full of stoke, then open up strava... As soon as I saw I'd gone slower than usual the stoke would evaporate, and I'd start questioning where I'd gone 'wrong'.

Deleted the app, and returned to my preferred metric of Smiles Per Hour. 

For those who missed the link, on iOS: Settings (the little cog top right) > Privacy Controls > Aggregated Data Usage > turn the toggle off

If you're riding unsanctioned trails you should also turn off flybys: Settings > Privacy Controls > Flybys > No one.

Also consider setting your activity default visibility to "Only you". It's easy enough to make it visible when you save/upload the ride.

I like that I have 10 (?) years of ride history in one place. It's fun to see trends over time.

While I am not a fan of strava for blowing up trails(my data has been locked down), when you visit a new place and just want to check out other people's loops its very nice. 

This last weekend I went to Wilder Ranch in Santa Cruz and have never found a loop a liked. I opened the app and got a recommended loop that I had never done in 30seconds. All legal trails, mind you. Finished the ride stoked on a new loop that missed some of the crap climbs. 

I do this a lot for trail running while working. The only other thing I like is stretching my creativity to come up with funny ride names, o and throwing off all the strava nerds with my psudomium account name. Keep them guessing...

The land of the free, but you can not hike or bike everywhere...

As for Strava, i like it very much. Mostly to keep track on my rides and i am a little more than normal interested i maps, so I like to watch thoose after nice rides. I also use the routeplaner for long mtb and gravel epics on not known places.

I like it.  As others have said it is great to see how many rides and miles I put in each year, pushes me to get out more often, sometimes too much if there is such a thing.  Someone mentioned feeling like they had to keep pace with prior rides or got disappointed, I got over that quickly and know there are good days and bad days.  Group rides are also a time when I could care less, enjoy the ride with others and get some miles in and that is it.  With Strava not every ride has to be a race.  

E-Bikers (I do have one) please make sure you change your activity, I hate seeing people smash times on an ebike, you can set up segments for ebike rides if you really need that in your life (I admit that I do).

I don't like strava because i don't care about the data it gives. I know people who love strava and use it. I wish some people would keep private trails off strava or strava would block private land or non sanctioned trails. That's one downside. KOM's are also annoying for downhill mtb trails with high traffic. That's more based on dumb users vs the app. 

Some "secret" trails in the Sea to Sky are brighter on the heatmap than sanctioned stuff now, kind of hilarious. Also some of these trails show up on the actual Strava map and some are even named (fairly new ones, like 1-2 years old only).The other annoying thing now is that if a user just browses around the map after a ride, they will see the heatmap and can stumble across trails. Obviously this was easily doable via going to the heatmap, but you used to have to do that on a computer web browser (or awkwardly on your phone browser) whereas it's now all in-app.

Not ideal but it won't change, so yeah, turn off data aggregation. Also if you use Trailforks make sure you set it up so your ridelogs are private.

Does anyone know if Garmin connect (not linked to Strava or trailforks) contributes to the exposure problem? 

Love: Using STRAVA to keep track of miles/hours on my equipment.  It helps me stay on top of service intervals.

Used to Love: the leaderboards, but I am old now and just getting slower so I don't pay much attention to them anymore.

Like: giving my friends kudos on their big rides

Dislike: I wish there was an option for shuttle and lift days that would not track elevation gain but instead would focus on the descending numbers

I don't use it myself, but I dislike the increased incidence of straight lines appearing on what used to be fun, twisty trails since people started using it.

However I like all the roadies losing their shit when a mate forgets to turn his off before loading his bike into the van and driving home.

If t has a map and other people can see it (even if aggregated/anonymized) then yes.

Strava is an unsanctioned and unmarked race in some places. Which leads to braiding trails, creating b c d and all the above lines. GPS discrepancies are common and device dependent. 

i agree with Veefour, the roadie side of strava is HILARIOUS. 

I personally use the free version of strava, I like to see how I improve on certain segments. Some people take it way to seriously, acting like the KOM on a segment will get them a jersey with rainbow stripes and in turn they are unpleasant to be around on the trails. 

Sorry, should have been more specific that that's what I'm wondering about. I haven't seen a map on the app like that and I'm not sure if that data is stored/shared somewhere else. Or if there is a map and I don't know about it. 

For me, it's more a public understanding of science thing or human dignity thing than a mtb thing. With any measurement, there's some minimum difference that matters to the person doing it. With any measuring tool, there's some minimum difference the tool can resolve. Strava was never honest with its user base about how long segments should be in order to have some agreed upon confidence level that rider 1 rode the segment faster than rider 2. For a leaderboard type function to be engaging to users the difference that matters may be smaller than the tool's resolution, making the whole thing kind of a lottery and basically misleading. It's a condescending kind of tech bro attitude that says this is gamification, don't take it too seriously, it is what it is, but then also dresses up all the UI/UX stuff to appear to be way more accurate than it is and a serious training tool or whatever and worth paid subscription. Don't like.

There's a map and whole bunch of other health data: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/general/unlocking-the-potential-of-ga…

Dislike:

Unsanctioned trails being tracked.  Yeah, you can remove aggregated, etc, but just turn it off and get in that habit, and call out others that track it.  Once someone posts it, it will blow it up and people continue to track it.  I went to a Forest Service meeting this year and they had the heatmap printed out explaining what unsanctioned trails they were planning to remove.  This also goes for Trailforks which has a heatmap that may be linked to other GPS systems besides strava.  Most bikers don't realize how much time goes into building a trail (~200hrs per mile).  When it is tracked it is unbelievably easy to find and remove it.  Be respectful to the builders and turn off your GPS / Instagram / whatever unless you have direct permission from the builder.  If you are unsure if a trail is sanctioned, turn it off! 

There is also a new functionality to "edit map visibility".  You can hide the map completely but still show stats.  I believe (correct if wrong) that this will remove it from the heatmap as well.  

Pricing - Dynamic pricing is ridiculous!  My wife's cost this year was something like $40, where they charged me $80.  We are the same age. This is because I'm a male adult, in the US.  It's different for every country and demographic.  I think this is BS. 

That said I pay for strava and I like it for the following:

Leaderboards, but mostly for trail maintenance and scouting.  I use this to monitor where down trees or issues may be, or when people are riding trails for the first time that year. 

Stats - I like seeing how much I've ridden vs previous years.  It helps me understand my level of fitness.

Analysis - I don't typically go for PR's anymore, but I do like knowing on sections of trails where I felt like I was riding well to compare against previous activities.  

Routes - These are slick, and way more accurate than trailforks (over inflates vertical).  I really helps estimate the difficulty and time of a ride. 

Social - I enjoy seeing what people ride and I think it gets me stoked to go ride. 

Hello fellow squids 

I have been mountain biking for roughly a year come from moto and bmx back ground and feel comfortable on the trails and recently paid for premium to start tracking segments and leader boards. 
my only dislike is how old the leader boards are, we had a really wet winter and the trails aren’t the same I love the natural terrain and roughness of trails that’s what it’s all about that’s why we have suspension, but I would like a 10 year reset or at some time frame. I’m not going to take a shovel to a trail to make it smoother for a faster strava time that’s just not right you don’t see that in any off road racing. I would love to see some of the riders that have top times come back and see if they can even get close. 
 

I do check yearly times and that makes me feel good about my riding, but the times on segments from 10 years ago will never be surpassed due to the conditions. 
 

Other dislike is E bikers that don’t change it to e mountain bike ride. 
 

Let’s shred strava name Steven Bauer 
 

Likes:
- Some data
- Seeing friends rides
- Sharing a beacon on solo rides

Dislikes:
- Data seems really simplistic
- Strava ho's who travel to destroy local segments

Hates:
- Promotes straight lines, which then get adopted by those without skill
- Heatmap data has shut down a lot of trails

Love:
- The ol yelling of "Strava!!!" when someone races by like a dick.

I use it for tracking and social but not segments due to years of habit. Been off the heatmap data for years. The "How to Turn Heatmap Data Off" is a conversation that needs to be had where mountain bikers gather (forums, social, etc) on the regular.