My apologies for the blog silence of late. Through the dark cold months I’ve been struggling with motivation through a series of colds, mechanical failures of both bicycle and car (the first taken care of under warranty, the second rather more costly to fix) as well as a full time job and family commitments… in brief – adult life.
Really, I have had no excuse for procrastination in either training or writing. And whilst logically I know that the hard hours put in over the winter pay dividends in the summer, translating that knowledge into action on a cold morning or a dark evening is 95% willpower (and 5% appropriate clothing.)
While I was at university we used to joke that the winners of the BUSA (now BUCS) championships in the early summer always had sun tans, and it’s a truism that getting away to somewhere warmer and sunnier tends to translate into better early season form to carry through the summer. But when all’s said and done, no matter how much we love to grumble about it, the British climate isn’t really all that bad. There are very few occasions when it’s physically impossible to get out and run – unpleasant, perhaps, but rarely impossible.
I just needed a way to boost my motivation. Since January I have kept a simple excel - based log of my sessions, with cumulative distance and calories, in much the same way as I used to keep a log of my track sessions, but stumbling on a link to a website called Strava has fired up my enthusiasm for training again simply by playing to my competitive nature.
Strava is, like so many other websites, a tool for logging your rides and runs. The critical Unique Selling Point of Strava, however, is the feature called “Segments”. Using proprietary logarithms, Strava takes the data that you log to its website and creates a Segment if a climb exceeds certain minimum criteria for vertical ascent and gradient. You can also manually create a Segment from a part of any route you run or ride regularly, so that each time you log a session that covers that particular road / path / trail, Strava recognises the Segment and gives you a comparison of your performance to the current best (“King or Queen of the Mountain” – QOM or KOM) and your previous efforts. It also, and here’s the rub, makes these Segments public (unless you prefer to keep your sessions private), so that any user can look at your performance and race your time over that same Segment.
After a couple of evenings of exporting data from Garmin Connect and uploading it to Strava, I was excited to find that I had a couple of KOMs on routes I had done over the last year. I could also see where my rides included Segments that others had created, and exactly how much slower I am than they. As somebody who struggles to make my commute a journey rather than a competition with myself anyway, this risks turning into an obsession!
As a Strava user, you can explore a map of your local area, or anywhere that takes your fancy, and find the Segments there. You can see how fast people are running and riding; you can add comments to their workouts and, if you’re so minded, you can then get out there and try and beat them…
On Friday I’m off to Pittsburgh for a week on business. I’ve already used the Explore feature to pick a couple of routes from the maps, hoping to topple some of the KOMs; meanwhile I’m going to keep an eye on the ones that I currently hold, against the day somebody does the same to me.
Here’s my most recent effort – a trail run up a hill behind our offices. 80m of ascent in 1.1km – fancy calling yourself King Of the Mountain? Do your worst!
http://app.strava.com/segments/990735