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Strava thread (for users of)

A fifth became a fourth today, and an eleventh also a fourth. 17/30.

Also got a 43rd place up to a 17th. It's a segment where I turn off at the end, to get the top ten I'm going to have to go straight on and change my route. The stuff I do for idiot virtual racing.

I'd have been challenging for KOM on another bit of the commute today had the lights at Whitkirk not got me. I was 27 seconds up on my best time when I hit the lights on red, and to rub it in the KOM on that segment is 27 seconds ahead of me. I equalled my personal best despite the lights.

I also got held up a lot through town, I've been over two minutes quicker through there. I'm beginning to think that if everything fell into place and I had a bit of a help from a tailwind I could crack 25 minutes. A perfect storm that'll never happen. I could easily do it at 4am if I ignored all the traffic lights, but I'm not enough of a prick.
 
Dogsauce said:
Also got a 43rd place up to a 17th. It's a segment where I turn off at the end, to get the top ten I'm going to have to go straight on and change my route. The stuff I do for idiot virtual racing.
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Glad I'm not the only one :)
 
Another one off the list this morning, got an 8th place, and climbed the ranks a bit on three others I still need. 18/30.

The difficult segments to bag will be the really short ones where it's often down to where the GPS checks in, on one there are seven people sharing a 14-second KOM, then 20 in second on 15-seconds, I'm in joint 59th place on 17-seconds. At the time of day I do it there's a fair bit of traffic about that's switching from one lane to the other so it's rare that I get enough space to safely have a proper go at it.

Since getting the modern road bike I've had personal bests on 16 of the 30 segments in six commutes, it's made a big difference. I am missing the downtube shifters a bit though, it's very easy to drop down several gears quickly, which is handy when coming up to lights. I haven't quite got the hang of shifting down quickly with the 'paddle' lever.

I'm also having trouble unclipping my SPDs on the new bike, I need to loosen them off a bit, I've embarrassed myself twice in the last couple of days by having to carry on out at a junction where it wasn't my right of way, waving apologetically to traffic that's had to let me out (only slow-moving stuff, but I still hate to reinforce the impression of the arrogant entitled cyclist ignoring the rules)
 
I can understand it on a nice empty country road or something (tho even there) but in town? Doesn't make any sense. Times are meaningless. All depends on lights, traffic etc. And the last place you want to be taking risks is in traffic or around peds.
 
Gaming the lights is part of the skill of it, learning the phases so that you know when to boot it and when you might as well sit back because you won't make it through. This is all part of normal commuting behaviour anyway. Before Strava I was generally timing myself each day with a cheap cycle computer to see if I could improve my time, this just breaks it up a bit and gives me something to aim for when red lights or traffic have already thrown a potential best time in the bin within the first mile or two. You're not going to get a best time if the road is busy, you just need those days when a certain stretch is empty at random. I've lost 12-14kg through this exercise which is beneficial. The little sprints I have are pretty much 'interval training'.

Fwiw my commute is mainly on big roads/dual carriageways with wide bus lanes (this is typical, only with less traffic), with only about a mile across the city centre, and the times that I do it this is fairly quiet (for two-thirds of my commute I'm going away from town, against the flow of rush hour). I don't pay as much attention or make as much effort going home as it's not safe to 'race' on most of that journey as it is busy in places and there are fast downhills which I'm a bit adverse to, the best times on those bits have been done outside of rush hour.

I know some segments that can only have been taken by people ignoring the lights, which isn't particularly fair, but they're a minority. I wouldn't say behaviour was worse because the more serious cyclists are actually pretty good for obeying the rules, it's the guys on MTBs or hipsters on fixies that generally seem to give less of a fuck about lights etc.
 
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fen_boy said:
You can flag segments as hazardous and they get removed if they're really dangerous, but on the whole yes I think it does encourage more risk.
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Is the Bow roundabout on the A12 on it or not? I often think of it as "Darwin's Interchange".
 
tommers said:
does this not encourage taking unnecessary risks?
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I'd never jump a light or put myself in danger. Just encourages me to push myself more. On my 9 mile commute, I tend to slow down at mile 5/6 by default; trying to beat my own times keeps me pushing harder right to the minute I hit my road.

Same when I'm recording runs; I won't, for example, run across in front of an approaching car to try and beat a KOM or my time.
 
Puncture fairy came in the night, so I was half an hour late setting off, which meant little chance of an overall good time due to traffic so I engaged in some tactical sprinting instead (including going straight on at the segment where I normally turn at the end). Bagged myself a joint 2nd, a 4th and a 9th (the KOM on the joint 2nd is probably someone in a car too, given they did it at 77km/h). Unfortunately I've dropped from 10th to 11th on another segment so I'll have to sweat that one out again, it's right at the start of the commute too and usually traffic-choked. Still, 20/30 is better progress than I was expecting. I can take it easy on the first lump now as they're all in the bag, save myself for the second drag up Selby Rd.
 
Woke up half an hour before my alarm and set off early to take advantage of quieter roads. Regained a top ten (third) on the one that had dropped down to eleventh yesterday, four seconds faster, a lot easier when the exit slip is clear! Picked up another segment further on, one I was thinking would be the hardest to get as it's round a fairly sharp bend through three sets of lights and there's normally traffic, but I came through near the end of the light sequence well behind the traffic and scraped a ninth (joint with quite a few others).

22/30 commute segments are now top tens. Eight left, four of which are stupid short sprints which are as dependent on where the GPS checks in as much as they are on speed, and four up the climb two-thirds of the way in which has been contested a bit by club members (two live at the top of it) which is going to take quite a bit of work and a tasty westerly wind to get in the rankings.

The gf thinks this is all just typical of my OCD, which is probably true.

The first spots of heavy rain landed as I walked from the bike shed to the office door, which felt like a little victory.
 
plurker said:
Being in the top 100 in London equates to 'being in the top 10 out in the provinces I'm sure?
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Certainly in the city, most segments are in the hundreds rather than the thousands here (the highest on my commute is just over 2000 but it's one of the daft 0.1km ones). I think most people don't just rock up to these city roads and think, yeh, I'll have a sprint here, they're just passing through. The hill bit (where I still need four segments) is probably the only bit on my commute where you might come upon it and see it as something to have a go at (I'm around about 20th place on those, out of 500 odd).

Out in the sticks when you get on the TDF route or anywhere in the dales it's in the thousands, and most will be people on road bikes having a go, so you soon get a lesson in humility.
 
& once you get in the thousands you'll get a fair few cars and GPS errors skewing things. The uphill bit of York Rd where someone's done 77 km/hr is very suspect.
 
Left a bit late today (thanks to being woken by a wife-beating dickhead up the road scuffling loudly with the police in the road outside at 1am), red lights and traffic so no points gained, although I felt like I was working hard on quite a few bits. Rucksack and only a light tail wind might have been a factor, but I wasn't exactly feeling my sharpest either. Equalled my best time on the short sprint by work, but I'll need to work a little harder/rely on a later GPS check-in to get it down to the six seconds(!) I need for a top ten. Wind looks pretty shitty all week really, I'll call it a training week.
 
Fuck the traffic lights at Whitkirk. Fuck them. I swear there's a bloke up a tree with a remote control looking out for me every morning.

dang.png

Still, knocked 18 seconds off my previous best time for this one. I'd have done better without the pedestrian crossing firing just after the 3.5 km mark too. I will have it.

Other than improving my time (but not my place) on this one, nothing else to report today, a handful of second best times. I think I'm starting to see diminishing returns from my new bike.
 
28/30 - scraped a tenth on one of the short sprints, but it's a tenth I share with 31 other people (15 seconds) so I'd like to chip another second off if I can (certainly doable). Tactically held back at the lights before the start so that the four cars in front would be well in front of me, though I still caught them and had to slow a little bit at the end.

Equalled my time on another short sprint that I still need a second off to get on the leaderboard. The remaining one is on the road outside work, it's a business park on a long road with roundabouts at each end and used for TT training by a few of the clubs, so it's going to be hard work getting that extra second off.

Two other segments on the ride went from a 7th to a 3rd and a 3rd to a 2nd. Average speed of 19.7mph, another target is for me to get that up to 20mph, steadily improving towards it. Once I get there I think I'm going to start taking it easy for a bit.
 
29/30, scraped a ninth on one of the short sprints this morning (during a commute where the lights were really against me). Just that stupid TT sprint to get now, I am eyeing the 15mph southerly on Friday with hope.

Unfortunately I lost two of my four KOMs on the commute route at the weekend, the 'segment of the week' for the bike club was out on the east side of Leeds last week and one of the members rode out there on part of my commute route and had a go at the full climb up Halton Hill, smashing the two times I did on my touring bike in a gale a couple of years ago.

Yeah, I have an excel sheet of course.

Strava.png
 
Still working hard on those commute segments, even took a diversion off my ride home from the club social to have a crack at a couple at the weekend because the wind was favourable. True sign off obsession! :facepalm: Someone grabbed two of my (then four) KOMs a couple of weeks ago and I've been back attacking the route with some fury, though haven't got those two back (it'll need a really good tailwind).

Nice run in on the second half of the ride this morning and picked up another KOM, a 6km one I've been working on for ages and have been repeatedly denied by the same set of lights, sailed through on green today and took it by 34 seconds (and bumped two other segments up to third). I now have seven KOMs out of thirty, with another where I'm third to two people who've done it in a car (I'm determined to beat at least one of the car times as I'm two seconds off it rather than bother flagging it - nice to have the challenge - though I'll probably flag the 47 second one). As I was cheerfully adding the new KOM to my OCD spreadsheet I noticed I'd been knocked back to eleventh on two of the short sprints, so I'm back to 27/30 top tens :mad:.

Next challenge will be to top 5 everything, it's only the sprints I need now.
 
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I'm in sole charge of the kids for three weeks so my Strava activities are limited to feeding the ducks. This is how fast you can go with a 7 year old on a bmx in your group :D

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Progress update:

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Still can't get that last stupid sprint (and believe me I've tried!), dropped to 11th on two other short segments that will be hard to claw back onto but certainly doable. Lots of improved times elsewhere. Looking at 11-25 cassettes on ebay...
 
Bang! Came into work late lunchtime today, and what a difference on the roads. Much less queueing traffic at junctions (and, possibly as a result, I got lucky with several long-ish reds) and fewer peds triggering crossings. It was so much quieter, in fact, that I chickened out of the Vauxhall dash and took the LCN route across the middle... and *still* took almost 2 minutes off my previous fastest commute :D
 
Popped out for a ride at lunchtime, noting the 18-20mph south-westerly on the forecast. Bagged two KOMs on a local hill and finally got a third place on that last stupid sprint on my commute route, getting the 0:06 time I've been chasing for ages. As end-of-level baddies go, it's been a tough one.
 
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Slippery slope weepiper. The first of many?

I tried to persuade the Mrs to have a go at a segment near my house on the weekend as it's only got nine people on it, and only one lady so the QOM is there for the taking. She was having none of it.

All the big climbers in the cycling club are getting twitchy at the moment because Tejvan is in town and their KOMs are at risk of getting snaffled.
 
Dogsauce said:
Slippery slope weepiper. The first of many?

I tried to persuade the Mrs to have a go at a segment near my house on the weekend as it's only got nine people on it, and only one lady so the QOM is there for the taking. She was having none of it.

All the big climbers in the cycling club are getting twitchy at the moment because Tejvan is in town and their KOMs are at risk of getting snaffled.
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Hopefully :D

There's only been 16 women on it tbf, but I was also 25th out of all 103 people of both sexes. I reckon I can get that down a bit too :hmm: many of them will be on road bikes, not on a heavyish mtb with tyres at 35psi because I haven't pumped them up since I was offroad the other day :oops::D

This is coming up, it's a pretty popular existing segment, a couple of my mates are entering and I'll probably go along to watch

http://www.rondecc.com/mur-darthur/
 
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