All Your Strava Are Belong To Us

   Strava, in Slavic it means food, or meal, or to feed.
   For the modern cyclist it can be anything from a neat app, to see how far your rode, up to a consuming obsession to trophy every ride and clutch all the KOM's in your sweaty mitts. So feed seems appropriate. The app is taking the feed from all(or a couple) of those GPS satellites winking overhead. It is feeding this data to you in the form of an easy to read graph.
    All you need is a smart phone or a Garmin. Once you complete a ride(or run, or walk, skiing. Just about any activity) you down load your data, see how long the ride was, feet gained, time, fun stuff.
     You also get segments, short timed stretches that you and other users create. Segments, like Pokemon, you want to kill them all. You find yourself remembering where they start and end, so yo can give your all and see how you ranked. Then possibly have a little cry(Really? 158 out of 164) Segments can make you do foolish things, like try to climb a hill as quick as a Cat 2 half your age, or bomb a twisty greenway loaded with pedestrians and extend-a-lead tethered pooches. Segments can lead to bench racing sessions trying to come up with a plan of attack. Where do you start sprinting? Can you get a lead out? Is it OK to hang on to this passing car?
     And segments lead to grousing. "There is NO WAY anyone is that fast", is a common refrain. Especially from those of us with glory in the distant past. But some are that fast. Some Pros, suffering from deep feelings of inferiority(You would think this would go away when you become one of the few that makes a living riding a bike), like to go out when they visit a new town and own every KOM they can find. It even makes The Real News.
     This leads us to the dark side of Strava. That's right, DOPING. Yep, you can dope electronically. I really like the segments, they make me work harder and the little trophy and medal icons do more for my riding than an adult should admit, but the idea of cheating for anonymous bragging rights is pretty crazy.
     A website, Digital EPO, lets you mod your input, spiking your speed slightly. It can increase your speed several percent. At a casual glance the data looks normal but, when zoomed in(Looking at a minute or two of data), there are regular spikes in the speed graph. These show you the rider juiced his numbers.

                                See those regular spikes? That is how you know it's cheating.

     One last thing about Strava. Strava shows where you start and where you end. It shows when you were riding and how fast you are. All of these things can lead a person of low moral standing right to your house when you happen to not be there so they can take that pricey bike you had all that fun riding. Strava offer privacy features that allow you to block your ride out from your home or office to a distance of about a half mile. You can also limit viewers to people that follow you or are in your groups. This can be done in the privacy tab of settings.
    Give it a try, track some rides, make some segments. Brag, cry, make excuses.