Strava
- Thread starter mandytheartist
- Start date
I do. And I know at least one other person does. I love it. I've never been so aware of my form, or the specifics of my running in my life. It also has functionality that allows it to work in tandem with heart rate monitors and other tools. The one thing is that it's not very good at calculating trail distances from my experience. It also won't let you split a run in half if you happen to use a car or something to reach another part of your route, So you have to record multiple times. But if you're taking the time to travel to a new section of your route anyway, that's not much of a setback. Overall it's awesome. Let's you compare yourself to other runners, tracks what shoes (or not in my case) you wear and how many miles you've gone in each pair. It also provides Excellent progression feedback on routes that you run on a regular basis. If you want to track your runs, I highly suggest it.
Is this a bad thing? Seems like it could provide some good info on usage?
Gotcha I like to hear what kind of things these companies do to make money and was just curious your thoughts. Smart that they are getting people to log what gear there using another revenue stream of course.
Sharing gear details was one of their biggest complaints because folk with very expensive bikes could be tracked back to their starting point, which is usually right outside their house. A no brainer for criminals if you make that sort of information public.
Personally I think it's a good site though, if it brings folk together with a common interest. It's kind of a win, win for all parties as long as long as you're sensible with what you make public.
I used to use it all the time for cycling but found that chasing segments kind of spoiled the enjoyment of the ride. I would go hell for leather at certain points and then coast some of the other parts. From an interval training point of view that did make me fitter but I was always thinking of the next segment so in the end I stopped using it and bought a Garmin to track my rides and runs instead. I do still have my account though and sync my Garmin Connect account to it but I consciously don't chase segments any more and enjoy my rides/runs more because of it. It is a brilliant tool for training though and if you have a premium account you get access to some of the Sufferfest turbo training bike videos and these are brutal!! Although as this is a running site the sound of those may not be appealing 
You can set up a privacy zone that will only let you see the segments of your run or ride within the radius you define. You can easily mask the exact distance you cover within that zone by staggering your starting point and not ending at the same spot, this way potential criminals can't simply measure the distance they can't see and divide by two. That alone should deter most. But if you're using really expensive equipment, I'd suggest not starting at your house. For instance I start at a local park in the center of town (though that's because most of the runs I know start at the high school a quarter of a mile south of that park)
I've often wondered about the security of tracking your workouts, as a lot of mine start from my house. I am not going to fire up my truck and go somewhere just to avoid where I live showing up in my route. Instead I make my courses all private, and only share the basic distance and time data, none of the actual location data except with friends (I only have 2 friends on my account). I use Endomondo though, not sure how the security compares with Strava, but I hear one of the big things with Strava is comparing yourself to everyone else for certain segments, which to me sounds like you would have to have all that set to public then. I'll keep my competition to actual races, and train with a bit of privacy.
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