Last year I had, by all accounts, a pretty good season on the bike. I had the opportunity to check off some areas and trails that were on my wish list for a long time. I got to return to a few areas I hadn’t ridden in years. Best of all, I got to spend the rest of the time exploring the embarrassment of singletrack riches surrounding my new hometown. As I have for years, most of this riding was tracked and automatically uploaded to Strava with maybe a couple photos or a (hopefully) witty ride title.
But, at some point over the fall, I noticed I’d started spending more and more time on the app after a ride. Adding a photo turned into checking out the infinite feed of what other friends had ridden lately. Or getting a bit too deep into Strava’s very questionable “stats.” Was this still a fun, social app that added to the ride? Or was it starting to take away from the experiences I had on the bike?
As I scrolled through the activities of friends that I know have more free time, or local pros that have nothing but time, I started to feel worse about my own riding. And I wondered, why was I scrolling? Why couldn’t I stop scrolling?
Was I… addicted to Strava?
While I refuse to utter the words “Strava or it didn’t happen,” I still might have crossed a line with the app.
An ancient Strava-art tableaux depicting dinosaur of fun in battle with the tiger of addictive UX design
Fun vs fitness?
Strava should be fun. There’s literally no point to sharing your exercises with friends online than fun (the sites training metrics are shoddy, at best). But lately, it’s not feeling like much fun.
It might just be me. I have less time to ride than I used to. And I definitely have less time that a lot of the people I follow.
Or it could be the rapid expansion of frustrating “features.” Some features are just annoying, some seem counter productive, and some feel more like shaming than encouraging. (Maybe if there was an option to turn any of these off, it wouldn’t bug me so much.)
Strava’s features have always been a balance of helping performance and making sure users open the app more times and spend more time looking at it. But, lately, the balance seems skewed towards getting people to use the app more, not perform better. Fitness score – which requires an asterisk explaining that higher isn’t better, counter to every human impulse – seems particularly egregious, as it blindly rewards more time not better training. Then there was the time that, when I was briefly injured, the app sent me a notification that I was about to lose some sort of continuity streak. Despite not knowing I had a streak going, I suddenly felt put out that I was about to lose it.
Whatever among these offences is the root cause, the result is the same: I’m having less fun. Not just on the app, but maybe on the bike, too.
Desperate times call for desperate measures?
Cutting the cords
I’m also having a hard time quitting. Despite quite effortlessly coming up with a list of grievances that would make any outside observer wonder why I still pay for this, I am also having trouble convincing my self not to track my ride. Or come up with a (maybe) witty title. And add a photo.
But it doesn’t stop there. I then look at the ride stats. That one section of trail felt good, but was I actually going fast? I look. I see a little bronze ribbon there saying it was my third fastest time on the trail. Third fastest isn’t bad, in fact it should be good. My heart still sinks a little, though. But would it actually matter if I’d gone faster? Neither Scott-SRAM nor The Syndicate were going to call if I’d landed a PR, or even hit the top-1o on the leader board. So shouldn’t my marker for success be how much fun I had? And why I’m I letting this little bronze ribbon make me feel worse about a ride I really enjoyed.
Comparison is the thief of joy, as they say. So why do I continue to mediate my riding through this little thief of an app on my phone? There is nothing in its training metrics and feedback that I’d actually consider useful (some, like “Fitness,” arguably encourage behaviour that is counter productive).
Photo: Getty Images
Five signs you might be addicted to Strava
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only rider who is, or could be, questioning their relationship with Strava. While addiction is probably too strong a word, I clearly am not having good interactions with the app. Here are five of the behaviours I took as signs that Strava and I should probably go on a break.
1) Scrolling when you haven’t ridden
If you find yourself scrolling through others activities when you haven’t had the time to ride yourself – and find yourself feeling anything other than joy for the opportunity your friends had to go exercise – then you’re probably not consuming Strava in a way that is productive.
2) Being unreasonably frustrated when recording goes wrong
If you’re actually mad when your ride doesn’t record, or your tracking device runs out of batteries mid-ride, you probably care too much about the stats and not enough about the actual activity. “Strava or it didn’t happen” started as a joke, not a maxim. If it doesn’t feel like a joke anymore, maybe you should turn off Strava for a few rides. And your other devices (Garmin, Wahoo, etc) as well.
“Who cares about leaderboards? Let’s run!”
3) Thinking more about your Strava than your ride, while you’re riding
If you find you’re letting Strava segments dictate your pace while riding, whether that’s not wanting to stop and enjoy a view, or have a chat, or slow to politely share the trail/road with other users, you might care too much about the virtual world and not enough about the real world around you. Especially if you’re doing this while riding with other people. Segments can be a nice motivator, but if they’re overriding other ride goals (like fun, or friends) that’s not great.
4) Spending more time analyzing segment times than you did riding them
If you spend three minutes on the computer breaking down your pace and how you could have gone faster on a segment that was only two minutes long, you’ve got things backwards.
5) Strava makes you feel worse about your ride than you did when you finished it
Even if Strava doesn’t make you feel bad about your ride, if you don’t feel as good about your ride after looking at Strava than you did when you stepped off the bike, the app is a net loss, not a net gain. Cut it out before it gets worse!
Strava Global Heatmap
Am I quitting Strava?
So, after all this you’d probably assume I’ve deleted the app. Well, not quite yet. But I’m going in that direction. A couple features are kind of useful for a few stories I have planned for these… pages? pixels? So I’m not quite quitting cold turkey.
I have made some progress, though. Over the weekend I deleted a ride instead of posting it. Other than a momentary pang of regret, it felt find. Instead of digging into the stats, I was left basking in the memory of climbing up through the fog and into the sun. With the feeling of a few near-perfect (for me) corners. Contemplating the feeling of a few less perfect corners – which Strava wouldn’t help me fix anyway. And joy of a couple hours in the woods with my happy little dog. Not bad at all.
Maybe next ride, I won’t turn the Garmin on to start with.