It's a numbers game

I've mentioned my Google Sheets tool that consumes all my Strava data via an API, and let's me slice and dice everything the way I want. There's nothing new there. But drilling down into some figures last night, I noticed some anomalies. It was a lot of elevation in 2019, more than I could remember doing. So I started investigating... and found multiple rides that year that were duplicated. There was even a pattern - rides recorded on my Wahoo Elemnt Bolt, synchronised to Strava and then edited to change the name. So these rides were effectively stored twice, once with the default name, once with the edited name. I've been through Strava and deleted all the duplicates, and whatever the problem was it didn't seem to happen after 2019, at least not for me, so my stats are in a better place now even if I haven't cycled quite as far as I thought.

This reckoning has sliced 1 off my Eddington number though, annoyingly. In turn, this has required me to revise my Eddington-related cycling goal for this year. It was:

• Increase lifetime Eddington from 46 miles to 48 (requiring three days of 48+ miles)

And it's now:

• Increase lifetime Eddington from 45 miles to 47 (requiring two days of 47+ miles)

Bugger.

If nothing else, that feels more achievable. Silver linings, eh?

Like a bear ...

... I'm putting on weight for the winter ...

... because I had a puncture cycling home from work last week, and I'm sick of them. So, although the foldable Continental Gatorskins my trusty flat-bar was shod with looked like they had a bit of life left in them (Strava tells me they'd done over 2,800 miles, mind), off they came, and on (with a hell of a struggle, a broken tyre lever and a broken Tyre Glider) went a pair of wired Schwalbe Marathon Plus.

Bottom line, I have a heavier but sturdier pair of tyres on now, roughly 50g heavier per wheel. They are grippy though, and feel sturdy. Plus they have the "Smartguard" reflective band on the tyre wall which, on my winter commuter, can only be a good thing.

The eagle-eyed amongst you (you? No-one reads this...) will have spotted the green dustcaps in the picture above. For yes, such was my ire at last week's puncture, I also fitted some Slime road inner tubes, These are much heavier than the Schwalbe Extra Light they replaced, adding about 110g per wheel. On the plus side, they felt quite comfy on this morning's commute which was a relief, as I had worried they'd be less pliant.

So after all those years of shaving every possible gram off the trusty flat-bar, I have just willingly added about 320g - more than seven KitKats! Impact? Well, I felt slower this morning, and it felt like harder work too. However, Strava suggests it has had no great impact on my average speed or top speed, so maybe it was just one of those mornings when it feels like hard work. Not getting any younger, slimmer or fitter, after all...

P.S. I tweeted (or Xed, or whatever) Tyre Glider about the breakage and they sent me a replacement, FOC, in the post. Good customer service, I would say.

Longfellow knew

Three relics

His poem was about a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead, but it could apply equally to cycling, for when it is good it is very good indeed, and when it is bad it is horrid.

This weekend just gone was supposed to be very good indeed. Three nights camping and back-to-back century rides. Booked in March, I envisaged mid-July to be clear blue skies, warm without being too hot, fresh air and fun. Shows what I know.

Pitching a tent in the rain on Friday was bad, but not terrible - at least it was a quick tent to put up, and had just enough of a porch to enable me to cook my night-before pasta-based meal. But that was about the last thing that went right the whole weekend. I certainly didn't sleep well that night, even after raiding the car for an extra blanket - it was cold! Mid-July and too cold for my two-season sleeping bag. I was awake every two hours, pulling the blanket back onto myself, and grumbling. But that was minor compared to Saturday's ride.

Up at 6.30, fed, dressed and on the start line five minutes before the 8am start time, I felt okay. It was still raining, of course, but I had my Altura NV2 jacket on and felt okay, warm and dry. And despite heavy legs off the line, by the time I hit the main road I was starting to loosen up. Unfortunately, I wasn't the only thing that was loose. As it had rained very heavily all night, the roads were absolutely full of all manner of grit, gravel and other detritus from the hedgerows. Despite my best efforts to avoid it, and having Gatorskins on the bike, I picked up a puncture after just 6.5 miles.

I've got pretty slick at changing inner tubes, generally, so even though it was a back wheel that had to come off, and it was peeing down, and I was stood in the gateway to some farmer's field, cursing like a trooper, it didn't take me too long to break out a new tube and lay it over the famer's five-bar gate, remove the punctured tube and hang that over the gate too, check the inside of the tyre for whatever had caused the puncture (I found nothing), put a tube back in, get the wheel back on and start pumping with my excellent Lezyne mini-pump. But the damn thing wouldn't stay up. Had I missed something in the tyre after all? No... in my sleep-deprived, rain-soaked, glasses-splattered, sweary hurry I had simply put the punctured tube back in, leaving the new tube hanging over the gate. What. A. Tool. And I don't mean the tyre levers (a Park Tool set, the best levers I've ever had, hands down). So off came the wheel again, out came the punctured tube again, and in went the new tube this time. Lesson learnt - pump the tyre up, at least a little bit, before you remount it. I usually do this anyway, and can't think why I didn't on Saturday.

Anyway, job done, and on the road again, cursing my luck (and the weather) for costing me 25 minutes and all the benefit of getting up early for a prompt start. Still, at least I'd had my bad luck for the day, I thought.

Except that 3.5 miles later, I had another puncture. I actually felt it go, it was such a sudden loss of pressure. Cue another gateway to another farmer's field, and the whole sorry process of tube replacement in the lashing rain again. This time I did find something in the tyre, a substantial cube of grit (mica, maybe?) had embedded itself right in and through the Gatorskin, leaving a sharp corner inside the tyre to do the damage. Little bugger, I thought. Still, I got my second spare tube in, inflated it, remounted the wheel and got going again... still getting drenched, still dodging the worst of the crap on the road, and now feeling vulnerable as I had no more inner tubes with me and my rear wheel was inflated less than I would like (brilliant though the Lezyne is, it can't get you to the pressure of a track pump).

I rolled into the first feed stop after nearly three hours, when I had planned to be there in under two. They had a track pump (thank you, support crew) and one (yes, one) inner tube left in my size. Seems I was far from the only rider to get a puncture. I wasn't even the only rider to get two. But at least I was able to press on with a little more confidence... so press on I did.

After 42 miles, my old friend Lower Back Pain started to make his presence felt. LBP is an infrequent visitor, I am relieved to say, but when he shows up, he shows up. At the lunch stop a few miles later, I broke out the paracetamol, more in hope than expectation, tried to stretch it out, and pressed on.

But trying to stretch out LBP is like pulling over to a service station on the motorway because you're feeling sleepy behind the wheel. The service stop wakes you up for a little while, but twenty minutes later you're back to feeling sleepy again. So it is with LBP. By 60 miles I was hurting and, to compound things, had added an extra discomfort in my stomach, perhaps by trying to push my core forward too much or too often, in a futile attempt to alleviate the LBP.

And it was still raining. And windy. And cold.

So when I came to a junction that offered the choice with pressing on with the 100-mile route or bailing and switching to the 75, I'm sad to say I switched.

Now I know the Velominati's Rule #5. But I also know that I had booked the weekend of camping and cycling as a treat, and to enjoy myself ... and yet I wasn't enjoying anything about it. So I gave myself permission to bail out. 75 miles is still 75 miles, and in those conditions, and with those mechanicals, still something to have done. But self-permission or not, I felt a miserable failure.

It stopped raining for a bit, that evening in camp, and I had a walk around the grounds and tried to feel less sorry for myself. The LBP had not abated though, and I felt very tired. I had three layers on, yet longed to be warm. I tried to phone home to cheer myself up but no-one was answering. Still, I thought, maybe I could switch to a shorter ride the next day, perhaps the 50 (which would still help me raise my Eddington, after all)? But it wasn't to be; something I ate disagreed with me and I was unwell during the night, to the extent that when I woke up on Sunday I couldn't contemplate a ride at all. I got dressed, trudged to the rider check-in and scratched from the day's events, watching morosely as a sympathetic woman scrawled "DNF" next to my name. DNF? I didn't even start. What a way to go out.

In between rain showers, mercifully lighter than the day before, I packed my stuff up, took the tent down and headed home. Was I falling out of love with cycling, I wondered? Had I ever really been in love with it in the first place? Or had I just needed ... something?

Later, as I cleaned the crap from my bike with Monkey Juice gel, and applied a layer of Weldtite Ceramic Shield, it occurred to me that maybe I loved everything about cycling except actually riding the bike? You know, pouring over Strava stats, making routes on Ride With GPS, the kit, lightweight carbon components and weight-weenieism, all of that. But actually riding? My stats will tell you that, since LEJOG, I have cycled less and less. Maybe I'm done.

But then I think about how Imogen Cotter is one of my sporting heroes of recent years, and how Ginevra Gargantini's is one of my favourite Instagram accounts, and realise that maybe I do still have an interest. And look at that last paragraph? I didn't get a bucket of soapy water out to clean my bike, did I? Even in a low mood, I broke out the Monkey Juice and Weldtite. Oh, and did I mention I cleaned the chain too, with my Park Tools CM-5.3 Cyclone Chain Scrubber?

Conclusion? We may have hit a rocky patch, but we're still together, just - me and cycling haven't consciously uncoupled yet. Watch this space to see whether we can work through our problems or whether a painful, costly, messy divorce is on the horizon...

A reminder from Geraint Thomas that sometimes you're the hammer, sometimes you're the nail...

P.S. There are a lot of product links in this post, so a reminder's in order. I don't get given stuff for free, sadly. Everything I use here I paid for. If I say it's good, that's because it is good, not because I'm commercially obligated to pretend it is, simple as that.

Wrapped

"Wrapping" at year end is a big thing now, isn't it? So although the year is not quite over, with eleven days of possible activity left, here are some highlights from my Strava "year in sport" to date.

This includes anything and everything I've recorded on Strava, not just cycling, but even so a couple of things stand out. It's flat where I live: in the whole year I've only managed just over 93,000ft of elevation ... and a big chunk of that was climbing a very high mountain overseas. Astonishing, really, when you consider I notched the best part of 56,000ft in nine days doing LEJOG. And how is lazy, unfit old me in the top 4% of most active users by time recorded? Because I record nearly everything, even one-mile round trips to the village shop, that's how.

Actual cycling-only figures for the year to date include:

• 1,436 miles covered (a whisker up on last year)
• 47,648 ft elevation climbed (so a lot more than an Everest but still less than one LEJOG)
• A longest ride of 149.55 miles, a lifetime PR ...
• ... but an annual Eddington of just 14 miles
• Over 122 hours in the saddle, probably 123 by the time I cycle home tonight
• About half of this year's miles were done on The Tank^TM, just over a quarter on Old Faithful and just under a quarter on the Project Bike

I might write some more about Eddington numbers in the new year, we'll see. My lifetime Eddington is currently 40 miles. In the meantime, more of my cycling stats are always available here.

All things are relative ... especially Relative Effort

Strava has a thing called Relative Effort; it's an arbitrary metric, developed from what they used to call the Suffer Score, and factors in time, difficulty and work to give a universal comparator of how hard you were working, regardless of whether you were running, cycling or swimming. For cycling, all I'm really interested in, the gradient of the road is factored in, as well as speed and duration - if you have a heart rate monitor on the go, that's included too.

Out of interest (and to gauge how reliable, and therefore useful Relative Effort is), I plotted the figures returned for each of the nine days of RAB. Brace yourselves, here comes a graph:

...which suggests there were five hard days and four easier days, and that the hard days were broadly similar, and the easier days were broadly similar... It also suggests days 1 and 8 were the hardest, with 3 and 4 the easiest. All of which I'd agree with. Maybe there's something to this Relative Effort lark...

Year on year

I started cycling regularly again about this time three years ago, and look how things have moved on...

Strava and lucre

If you're even half-way serious about cycling, you probably use Strava already. As we all know, if it's not on Strava, it didn't happen, right?

One of the great things about Strava was always that you didn't need to pay for it unless you had quite specific requirements - the free version was very feature-rich. Sure, there were upgrade options - Strava called them Summit packs, and there were three, Training, Safety and Analysis, each offering specific functionality. You could also bundle them together if you wanted everything. Plenty upgraded, and got the little orange chevron next to their name, but plenty, myself included, had everything we needed from the free version.

You'll notice that a lot of that last paragraph was in the past tense. For Strava have ditched the Summit packs and moved to a much simpler model - you're either free or you're a paid subscriber, simple as that, with all subscribers getting everything.

Now here's the rub. Strava is not yet a profitable company, and that has to change, I get that. So, to coincide with this change of pricing model, Strava has moved some of the previously free features to sit behind their subscriber paywall. Yes, they're also rolling out new features for subscribers, but let's be clear here, they need to have more paid subscribers and so are making some popular features "premium". Here's a list of what was free that no longer is:

• Overall segment leaderboards (Top 10 view is still free)
• Comparing, filtering and analyzing segment efforts
• Route planning on strava.com, with better maps and support for segments
• Matched Runs: Analyze performance on identical runs over time
• Training Log on Android and strava.com
• Monthly activity trends and comparisons

Now monthly activity trends and matched runs - big deal, can live without those easily enough, and I suspect I'm not alone in that. Similarly, the Training Log... well, that was more useful but, if I'm honest the only thing I used that for was to summarise the previous week's total distance, elevation and longest ride for this blog. And - top tip - you can still get those three metrics from club leaderboards, although they are limited to the current and previous week only, whilst the Training Log lets you go back to any point in your history.

Route planning is another big change. They're softening the blow by saying that their new route planner integrates segments better, and that's great but not enough to make me get out my wallet. Not when ridewithgps.com does route planning every bit as well and arguably better, since it generates cue sheets right off the bat, and talks to my GPS just as seamlessly as Strava, without charging me for the privilege.

The real kicker, then, in the changes to the Strava pricing model is that they make so many segment features subscription only... Strava is segments, segments are Strava. It is Strava's defining feature, what distinguishes it from its competitors. Yes, the Top 10 leaderboards are still visible but for me, and most others, Top 10s are usually out of reach. The leaderboard I was always most interested in was for the people that I follow - how do I compare against my mates, in other words. That's gone now. And in terms of a bigger picture, Top 10s are nice (I do have a few) but realistically I was more interested in knowing if I was in the top 250 for a segment, and I can't tell that any more.

Now there is a partial workaround for this, for now. The Elevate App for Strava is a Chrome extension that gives you a passable training log substitute and also integrates some segment stats into Strava itself, like this:

I really can't recommend Elevate highly enough, it's terrific and integrates seamlessly with Strava, at least when you're using the .com through a browser (it's no help for mobile Strava apps, obviously). But even Elevate is going to change imminently, and it won't be long, surely, before Strava pull up the drawbridge on their API, especially around segments, as they seek to turn users into subscribers.

There is some good news, at least; Strava are giving users a 60-day free trial of the subscription service. Of course, if you forget to cancel the trial before the end then you start paying full whack. And I guess that's the other good news - that "full whack" is only about £4 per month, so falls squarely in the "cup of tea and a slice of cake" price bracket. But if you're already paying for other cycling subscriptions, such as simulation software for your turbo trainer, then all these little amounts add up: £4 here, £10 here. Where does the line get drawn?

I do love comparing segment times with people I follow though... think I might wait for lockdown to lift, then try the 60-day trial. I'll report back here if I do.