In a world filled with pet peeves, one stands above the rest.

You’ve witnessed this athlete but never noticed them.

They’re in the biggest race of their life — a state championship, a World Cup, a world-record attempt… even an Olympic final — but they can’t help exit reality at both the start and the finish to do something so meaningless, so pointless, so ridiculous, so ….stupid….it should be ridiculed until the end of time:

Tap their watch.

When an athlete starts their GPS or Apple Watch — evidence that even the most struggling middle-class person today has more wealth than Nebuchadnezzar ever did, at least according to Doug Wilson — at the beginning of a race and stops it as they cross the finish line (ignoring in the process the people they’re, you know, competing against) the first thing I wonder (aloud) is, “does that person have a buttermilk biscuit for a brain?”

Sad, really. The action proves just how depraved society is.

We care more about Strava — the social media for fitness junkies and DIII runners who can’t give up the dream (HEY! Wait a minute….) — than what is actually at stake in a race: striving alongside comrades in competition to test their limits and help us discover — and push – our own. And victory, of course.

What Would Pre Do? Not that.

Alas, perhaps Strava can, as Lloyd Christmas once said about elderly motor vehicle drivers, “serve a purpose.”

Maybe there’s a way to leverage this site, which records every detail of your workout, even down to the heart rate variability that results from different daydream stimuli (it doesn’t actually do that). As a (former, obviously) user myself, here are my only three possible positive approaches.

1. Lie

This tactic is good if you have no other real option when it comes to intimidating your opponents. Did an athletic friend just upload a fairly impressive 63-minute 10-mile run at 8,500ft? Work the comment section.

“Hey man, thanks for recording my warm-up,” you could type before drilling down to specifics.

“Those 6:30 miles really helped me prepare for the 30×400 repeats I did in 62 seconds with a 15-meter jog rest right after…up Davos Trail directly north of Cripple Creek Rd, where you stopped.”

Assuming your chief rival sees this, I bet he’ll be quaking thinking about how fit you are.

2. Upload sporadically

In this approach, you don’t lie about your efforts. You only upload the best ones.

Who cares if your 150-mile bike ride where you averaged 32 mph was with the wind the whole way and came between a three-week taper and a three-week “illness?” They don’t know that. No one knows that. And they never will.

Oh, so you don’t ‘often’ bike the Maah-Daah-Hey trail AND run it on the same weekend? It’s ok. You did that one time.

If I might chase this rabbit down a brief trail quick (don’t worry, it’s not a segment you’d care about) this highlights a mistake many are making on other social media websites, too.

You’re not in debt to Facebook to post everything about you nor are you contractually obligated to log every waking moment. You can totally decide to post a picture of your face after jaw surgery or the mess your children made last night or the dog’s poo on the living room couch…..but don’t kid yourself: we’d rather see an attractive shot of you at the perfect angle, with the perfect lighting, on the perfect summer trip you took in front of Big Ben with your kid smiling and holding onto an ice cream cone in a pose no professional photographer could arrange without at least 17 hours and unlimited stand-in GQ models.

The same goes for workouts. When you ‘flatted’ in the last MTB race (RIGHT at the moment where THE break was made…THE BREAK….), we could care less. When you say your tempo run was ‘derailed’ by GI issues, we maybe should care more, but we really ought to care even less.

You’re not being ‘real.’ You’re not being transparent. You’re not ‘sharing everything, even the rough stuff.’

You’re just making excuses.

3. Upload everything

I don’t recommend this approach for two reasons.

One, you unnecessarily provide ammunition and/or information to your rivals.

Two, you unnecessarily apply pressure to your own psyche.

The same internal and external comparisons plaguing teenage girls on Instagram hinder grown men on Strava trying to qualify for Wave 3 of the Leadville 100. If they saw so-and-so rip up some trail 3.2-seconds per mile faster than they did, they don’t feel quite as confident lining up next to them on Harrison Avenue. Even if that person is literally Galen Rupp and the trail is actually just Hayward Field. And especially if it’s Kilian Jornet and the trail is actually a 5.15d rock climbing route.

Additionally, when they realize they completed the 13-mile Saukeye Loop 1 minute, 17.54 seconds faster a month ago, they start to wonder if they’re slipping. Oh man, that one cut too close to home.

Finally, while some like to argue that Strava is a good way to document training, I think it might be just the opposite.

What if you woke up one day and, after you sipped your bark-infused latte and did 17 situps (both logged via GPS in real-time) the whole platform simply vanished. Or, if you picked up the New York Times and discovered it was hacked by Russians. Imagine if, in place of that ‘epic’ 72-mile road bike performance you offered the world on July 11, 2019 at 11:32 a.m. in Golden, Colorado, there stood a post that simply read, “Crooked Hillary!!!! Vote for Trump!”

So, why is this included in a list of three “possible positive approaches” to Strava?

Because if you incorporate it, you will become positively brainwashed into thinking that if you don’t upload your workout to Strava, it really never happened.

Conclusion

In all seriousness, I think Strava is kind of a sweet website. I love dorking out over stats. And if you do, too, then by all means, cheerfully continue to sell your soul to the devil!

(Person whispering: I did NOT expect that sentence to end that way!)

(Friend of Whisperer: he’s just jealous….)

Again, in all seriousness (because, have I even been at all serious this entire time? I’ll let you decide), I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings here. Just be careful.

Your worth is not tied directly to your Strava badges or medals or whatever.

Ryan Sederquist

…

….it’s obviously connected to your KOMs…or (and?) QOMs…

I do remain resolute in this view: don’t you dare log your world record attempt on Strava. That kind of race will be recorded by professionals. The same goes for the Olympics. Or even the lowly NCAA championships or Class AAAAAAAAAAA or BBBBAAAD division C state cross-country championships.

I mean, if people at the finish line still depended upon pieces of masking tape with your name, grade, school, etc. to keep track of things, then I could understand your compulsive clicking of an independent timing source.

Official: “I’m sorry Cheptegei, but since that Rotary volunteer lost your nametag, we don’t know where you came in.”
Cheptegei: “Don’t worry, I logged it on Strava!”
Official: “Great. Here’s the silver medal.”)

Real conversation at recent olympics

Then again, maybe I’m just behind the times. I use a training journal. When I run on Tuesday for 70 minutes, I write

Tue – ’70 min run’

Sometimes I give a detail.

‘Ran w/Tom.’

Sometimes I give multiple details.

‘Last 2m tempo. For me. Not Tom.’

When I get to the end of the year, I inefficiently draw out a spreadsheet with imperfect lines and irregular-sized boxes and enter my cumulative data. Then, I add up each week, mentally (a calculator? Are you kidding me? Next thing you know the Chinese government will be spying on your children sleeping in their cribs!) and plug it all in. And that’s that.

Someday, when paleontologists and archaeologists discover the rubble that was once Shovel Lake Public Radio studios, one of them will unearth my log and shout, “EEEgahst!! The internet never made it here! How could he have not used Strava?”

Hmm. I don’t like that ending. Maybe I should come to grips with the fact that Strava is useful.

Maybe it can make you better.

Maybe it can even help you win the race.

If that’s even what you’re going for.