ICONS OF CYCLING
Strava
The ride log has created a global cycling club – and transformed how cyclists interact with social media
Cogito, ergo sum, posited Descartes, the great cyclist: ‘I think, therefore I am’. Now we have a different philosophy: ‘If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen’.
The computer platform for sharing workout data was launched in 2009 by high-achieving Harvard sporties Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath, named after the Swedish sträva (‘stray-var’), meaning ‘strive’. Around 100 million people worldwide now use it to spread their activity data from fitness devices. The dozens of activities include alpine skiing, canoeing, rock climbing, swimming… even zombie treadmills (A to Z, then).
But most are cyclists. No wonder. A bike is a two-wheeled metrics generator: speed, power, location, weather, altitude, attitude. For training obsessives it’s, well, obsessive: two-thirds of Tour de France cyclists are Strava devotees.
Socialites
Recently Strava has developed its social side. Not all users compete over stats. For many it’s Facebook-for-cyclists, in orange not blue, and not bombarded by ads, fakenews clickbait or warring halfwits. Their posts are more like mini-travelogues, with cake-stop photos, amusing reports of harmless jeopardy, and amiable banter.
Strava’s given us new jargon. ‘Kudos’ (akin to a Facebook ‘like’); ‘segments’ (popular route sections, listing the fastest completers); and ‘KOM’/‘QOM’ (quickest rider on a segment, ‘King/Queen of the Mountains’, even if the ‘mountain’ is a Lincs fen). It’s enabled a new visual art discipline: some routes creatively trace out the Mona Lisa, a Welsh dragon, even a marriage proposal. (It was accepted, presumably with a kudos.)
Bumps in the road
It’s produced 21st-century problems too, however. Its heatmaps, superimposing cumulative rides by everyone, have unwittingly revealed sensitive locations such as military bases, while personal posts pinpointing a clearly affluent rider’s home have resulted in targeted bike thefts. And there’s data exploitation: like every freebie app, if the product is free, you are the product (there’s an enhanced paidfor version too though). But Strava keeps growing, despite technically not making a profit. As Descartes might have said: Non Strava, non factum.