Month: May 2016

Six Ways to Suck at Strava

On By Bobby Geronimo1 Comment

this.is_.strava

We all love Strava.  Or hate it.  Or spend hours obsessing over it while simultaneously pretending that we don’t care at all.  As has been pointed out exhaustively—it’s a pretty polarizing piece of the social media puzzle.

I personally spend anywhere between five minutes and two hours a day on the site, a time usually determined by how impressive I deem my current activity levels.  If I went on a run that boasts impressive stats, I’ll repeatedly open the page throughout the day at work just to look at the run—check my splits again, memorize my segment goals or simply just stare at mileage totals. 

If I haven’t been doing anything impressive—or anything at all—I am far less likely to open the app throughout the day.  I’m just going to see that Dylan Bowman ran 22 miles in a little over 40 minutes and summited Mt. Tam for the #108 time that week.  Or that Anton Krupicka rode his bike 150 miles to the base of Longs Peak before skipping up the keyhole route and tagging the summit.  Just a bunch of depressing shit mainly.  But you can’t say that it isn’t motivating. 

Strava at it’s best is a statistical catalog that allows you to track and share your endurance activities while giving you a transparent look at the training programs of your friends and some of your favorite athletes.   

Like all social media, however, it can be horribly misused.  Just like you have friends who suck at Facebook or Instagram whose name you dread seeing pop-up in your feed, we all have those people on Strava that we feel obligated to follow even though they suck at using it and perpetually flood your feed with garbage.

If you’re already one of those people who suck at Strava, just keep doing what you’re doing.  If you are using it properly, please stop immediately and follow these six steps:

1. Break your run into as many parts as you possibly can.    You would never want to have a single activity as your run on Strava.  Then you’re just lumping your warm-up, cool-down and actual run into one thing.  This is going to bring your average pace way down.  Not cool. 

If you can, try to break every run into 4 separate activities: pre-warm up, warm-up, run, cool-down, and post-cool down cool down.  That way, we can all see your “real” pace during your workout but you can also flood all of your follower’s feeds with multiple activities. And— perhaps most importantly— you are effectively quadrupling your Kudo potential.  Just think about all of those extra Kudos. They are going to make you feel sooo good.

2.  Put EVERYTHING you do on Strava. Did you walk to the mailbox?  Strava that shit.  Did you walk around Whole Foods for 15 minutes?  Strava the hell out of that shit.  That’s mileage you gotta keep track of.  When you’re looking back at your training log trying to figure out why you performed so well last year, the answer might be in all those walks down to the corner store for beers.  You never know.

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Holy shit bro, you were walking FAST that last mile. 

3. Log your indoor resistance training workouts (with details).  I love it when I’m looking through my feed and I see “Lats and Core Work Today” or “4 x 10 reps of Bicep Curls”.  This is really why I started using Strava. Oh, the motivation!  I think I’m going to drop to floor right now and do 25 pushups so I can log it.  I should probably take a photo too…

4. Sign up for every possible challenge that you can, every month, over and over again.  Sign up for the 10k challenge every month, even though you run a 10k every other day.  And definitely sign up for the open-ended challenges that track your mileage monthly, that way it pops up into feeds each time you run 25 or 50k.  That’s better.  I love when I can’t even see a single activity in my feed because all I can see are someone’s list of 14 current challenges. It’s awesome.

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Nothing against Jorge Maravilla obviously- the guy is a badass- he just sucks at Strava

 5. Create a bunch of segments-within-segments so you can find the perfect section where your time cracks the top ten. I know Strava says they don’t want you doing this but simply ignore all those warnings about your segments being to similar to existing segments.  And definitely do NOT make it private. We all need to see these results and how amazing you are.

6.  If you go running on the treadmill, please take a picture of the treadmill screen after you’re finished.  Otherwise, you could totally be lying.  Plus, when Strava updated their app to give photographs a much bigger role in the interface, this is exactly what they had in mind: treadmill photos.  Just like treadmill runners are their target demographic for Strava Premium Memberships. 

An Open Letter to the Non-Runner

On By Bobby GeronimoLeave a comment

I know what you’re thinking: Here’s another self-righteous asshole trying to tell me what to do. Up on his high horse, berating my sedentary lifestyle, tossing around phrases like “obesity epidemic” and “heart disease”.  Making grandiose claims about brain chemistry, all while promising a decrease in body fat and an increase in energy. 

But that’s not what I’m here to do.  I want to talk about running in the context of our culture.  I want to talk about running as a way to escape. 

I used to be just like you.  There was nothing about running that appealed to me.  I used to sit behind the wheel of my car and scoff at the idiots running by in their short little running shorts and stupid visors.  I would laugh at their sweat stained shirts as the artificially cooled air spilled out of the vents and into my face. 

“Why would anyone want to run, just for the sake of running?” I would often wonder.  It just didn’t make sense.  It was too simple to be attractive. There were no bells and whistles.  It wasn’t exciting enough. “If I want to do cardio, I’ll just play basketball.  Then at least the running has a purpose beyond just… running.”  

But then something changed.  And it wasn’t from a physical standpoint, like you’re probably imagining.  No, this particular change came from a spiritual standpoint.  To put it succinctly, I was bored.  I had gotten myself into a place where I was completely overrun with stimulus; sounds and pictures and lights constantly bombarding my senses; computer screens and TV screens and a cell phone screens, music being pumped directly into my ear canal and advertisements shouting at me from every direction I looked.  But somehow, amidst the ever-present stimuli being disseminated on a level unlike anything the human brain has ever seen, I was incredibly bored. 

I found myself withdrawing further and further from the reality TV, fast food, endless-consumption culture that was being thrust upon me at every turn.  It just didn’t feel right.  Everything about my life had become so complicated.  All the technology that professed such convenience and comfort was making me feel like a prisoner.  Complications that beget more complications.  Did it ever end?  Suddenly, I was craving simplicity. 

As Steve House, arguably the finest American Alpinist, reiterates many times in his book, Beyond the Mountain, “The simpler you make things, the richer the experience becomes.” It seems counter-intuitive, but if you keep it simple you’ll never get bored. We’ve been brainwashed by consumer culture to think that we need a huge production to be entertained.  I’m here to tell you that the exact opposite is true.  What you really need is to get as far away from your cell phone and TV as is possible in your current situation.  You need to pull the headphones off of your ears, get off of the air-conditioned car seat and start putting one foot in front of the other.  Just run—like we’ve been doing for thousands of years.  It’s time to regain a little primal simplicity.

Use running as a way to stand up and rebel.  Don’t watch Keepin’ up with the Kardashians like everyone else.  Don’t spend countless hours a day mindlessly browsing Instagram and Twitter feeds like everyone else. Just get outside and do exactly what we were designed to do: move. 

Use running as an escape.  Don’t think about how many calories you’re burning or how fast you’re running. Take the most simplistic, primal activity that exists and make it a part of your everyday life.  Get away from your work emails and group texts.  Don’t worry about the trending topics.   Just enjoy the rhythm of your feet falling onto the dirt or the road or the grass.  Really listen to the sound of your breath.  Connect with the landscape.  Find your place in the natural world.  Find your flow.

If you’re even a little bit like me and you’ve been feeling bored staring at all those screens—trapped in a world that never stops trying to sell you something—I am offering you a simple, no-strings-attached escape:  Run.