Cheating at Strava

 

I recently read a New York Times article about cheating in Strava. It seems that there is a site dedicated to helping people falsify their data.

I would never knowingly falsify my Strava data, but occasionally do it by accident. 

What happens is that I go cycling a distance from home and I bring my bike to the start point in the back of the car. I then use my bike computer to track my cycle. Occasionally I forget to turn off my bike computer when I return to my car. The bike computer is still tracking my cycle while I drive home at 120km/h on the motorway.

When this happens I get an email from Strava entitled "suspected fraud". :-/

Whether to use MapMyRide or Strava

One of the ways to make exercise more fun is to share records of your activity with your friends so that they can like and/or comment on it. I used to record my activity regularly with MyTracks, but as my phone got older and less powerful I got out of the habit.

Recently I got a new more powerful phone and decided to start recording again. It seems that the most popular apps currently used by cyclists are MapMyRide and Strava, but I heard conflicting reports about which was best. I decided to use each of them for a month and then use my experiences to decide which is best.

Just as I was ready to write up my review, I found an existing review which summarised almost exactly what I found myself. The only additional points I would make were:

• Strava now has support for saving routes which was one of the main features missing when the previous reviews was written.
• MapMyRide now has support for segments which was previously a big advantage for Strava
• There is a better social vibe on MapMyRide since it seems to have a wider range of people I know using it. Strava in contrast seems to be only used by more serious athletes whose main form of socialisation is to race each other up hills.

Overall the two applications are very close, but I decided to stick with Strava as my main app. The main deciding factor for me was the amount of annoying advertisements which appear in the MapMyRide app - they can seriously interfere with the usability.