corrado33

Was messing around on strava today, looking at the top people on some of the challenges for the month of June.

Clicked on the top person on the "Furthest Distance" running challenge... ~1500 km this month (running...)

(Apologies for the running, not biking content...) The top biker seems to be a legitimate ultra distance biker trying to break the world record for most distance in a year, so that's no fun.

So I clicked further. I started noticing some of his "runs" were 12 hours long. I thought to myself. What the hell? Who the hell does something like this? Is he actually running? Two 40+ mile runs in two days? (Back to back.) I know there are some crazy people out there, and I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, but really?

https://www.strava.com/activities/617006226

Click a little further and you find his best "estimated" mile pace is 3:45 and he ran a mile in 3:12 on one of his runs. I'm sure you can find inconsistencies on everyone's strava, but meh.

So, I wanted to create a "What the hell?" strava thread. Inconsistencies, blatant lies, suspected e-bike doping, anything you want to post. Eventually we'll hold a vote for the worst or something.

No, I don't care that these things are posted. Strava is more of a social networking site than a performance indicator site, so you need to take everything with a grain of salt. I generally assume 10% of the people are cheating in some way. Either by "kom" hunting, aka driving out to the start of a segment just to give 100% on the segment, then driving back, or by drafting, or using e-bikes, or simply driving.

Cue the "you're just jealous that they are better athletes than you" posts. Not really. I ran competitively in college. I know there are people who will always be faster/more athletic than me.

EDIT: The one time I forgot to turn off my garmin when we were driving back from a mountain bike ride, the strava ride was flagged in a matter of hours, overnight. Now that ride is private and no one else can see it.

Elvo

Robert Young fakes run across America

cliff notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...IXYa_hAk/edit#

indyfabz

Do you think you would call B.S. looking at Strava data from the winner of the GDMBR race because it showed nearly 2,800 miles and over 200,000' of climbing in around 13 days?

corrado33

It depends, was there significant training beforehand? Or did it start out of nowhere? Do the rides look legitimate? Are they at a reasonable pace?

I don't report strava segments because I don't care. I just find it funny to point out the crazy ones. Whether or not they are true.

smarkinson

That run is part of Greg Browns 5,500km run across Australia to raise money for the Cancer Council.

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/new...992d34f94f9586

corrado33

Wow! Awesome! Congrats to him, but still what the hell!?? Who does that? I quickly googled his name and didn't see anything come up. Considering how slow they were, I never thought they were fake per se, just very, very odd.

EDIT: The Robert young stuff above is awesome. What kind of person do you need to be to fake something like this?

drlogik 

To your point, Strava is not a hard core performance tracking site. It does a decent job though. On every ride it tells me my max speed is 31 MPH or so. I'm riding a fixie, ain't NO WAY!

corrado33

I'll post another example.

Is it fake? Maybe, maybe not. But still. What the hell. Very small (relatively) amounts of mileage per week 100-300 for almost two years, then suddenly an 1800 mile week? Is that even possible?



This is from the 10th place person on the distance challenge. Longest ride for this person is 1300 miles.

https://www.strava.com/athletes/3944477

Again, googled, didn't find anything immediately obvious for an ultra cyclist or something.

Marcus_Ti

Not everyone uploads every ride they do every day to Strava. Some people flag them private or otherwise. OTOH, could also be cheating.

As with everything...why worry about people who may or may not be cheating themselves? Ride your damn bike. Considering there are many professional athletes on Strava, odds are little old me and you are never going to be in the top-1000 in any given challenge.

corrado33

I'm not worrying! I simply thought this would be decent entertainment as I love to look at stuff like this.

I'm ranked 55th thousandths place on a challenge.

smarkinson

You need to learn how to Strava stalk.

That rider did the Wild Atlantic Way Audax ride. 2100km in 175 hours:

https://www.strava.com/activities/620752451

There's nothing odd about someone suddenly doing a huge cycling event and thus having a huge spike in their weekly mileage.

Although it seems some of the rides she double recorded which may have boosted the totals.

If you are interested in funny/peculiar/outright cheating strava activities then may I recommend the KOM defender club. Check out the Discussion page where people post links to these types of activities.

https://www.strava.com/clubs/komdefender

canklecat

Every hobby and activity that can be measured or evaluated objectively or subjectively will attract some of these guys and gals who crave attention for their numbers rather than for any intrinsic value in their product or performance.

When I moderated a once-popular photography website on which the admin introduced a ratings system, there were always a handful of members who gamed the system, used sockpuppet accounts to inflate their ratings, or formed cliques to push each others ratings higher. Few of the highest rated photos would have survived the first round of weeding out in any juried competition. It was mostly a mutual backrub society for insecure people with artistic pretensions coupled with some experience in generating useless currency from having played Monopoly as kids (as opposed to genuinely talented artists who are also insecure and have no business sense at all).

The best thing a publicly accessible rating/evaluation type system is good for? Generating outraged discussions on the interweb. It drives traffic.

DrIsotope

Screenshot of a short-term leader in the May Distance Challenge.



Enrico Pizzi
His account is still active, and though most of the rides have been flagged, his totals are still there and absolutely ridiculous. Just absurdistry:

Avg. 54 rides per week.
57,517miles in the year, 321 miles per day.
3,583 hours ridden in 2016, and there have been 4296 hours in the year; so he sleeps 4 hours a day, and rides 20.
3,161,434ft climbed, or 17,661ft per day.

It's the stats you'd expect to see for a decent sized club, not one person. The real question is... WHY?

hankaye

OP, Howdy;

Ever hear of The Western States Endurance Run
Those folks do 100 miles in one shot.
Talk about nutz !

hank

smarkinson

I remember looking at this guy a few weeks ago.

Here is one of his rides. If you look at the other athletes his name comes up 6 other times. One of the times is on the iphone app, another with a Garmin 520 and the rest look like they have been synced from other sites like Garminvivoactive, runkeeper and runtastic. So he does one small ride and uploads it 6 or 7 times and before you know it he's racking up mega mileage.

https://www.strava.com/activities/621220663#15180489214

He quite often rides with this person who also records multiple activities for a single ride:

https://www.strava.com/athletes/6093771

The question is indeed why? Recording twice might be expected (once on iphone and once on Garmin 520) as a back up. The others through the other websites look like they are automatically synced with Strava.

I find it interesting but can't say I lose too much sleep over it.

Darth Lefty 

I have a MTB segment that I'll never get a PR on, because it's parallel to a fire road that I've done 2x faster, and a few times Strava has picked up the wrong segment.

BlazingPedals

One of my brothers qualified & ran in that race three times. He only finished once of the three.

Gweedo1

You need to ask why? To make a mockery, of the joke that is Starva. That's why.

indyfabz

What I described is about what the winner of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Race does. Two weeks ago I encountered more than a dozen race participants in the Pioneer Mountains between Polaris and Wise River while I was out that way touring.

Hypno Toad

I'll take a different angle on the "what the h*** people on strava": the Strava-nannies. You know, the person the flags segments as hazardous for no good reason. I created a segment with one stop sign, and it was flagged. Really?!?! By that criteria, you'd flag 80% of the segments.

Hypno Toad

I might know this guy (or somebody just like him), my friend is an ultra-marathoner. I met him on some endurance rides, not his bag-o-tea, but he likes the cross-training.

This guy competes in 100-mile runs! He averages 50 miles running per week, he's run over 1,400 miles in 2016. I don't get it, I'm happy to ride big miles, but I can't wrap my mind around his runs.

Marcus_Ti

A stop sign in the middle of it? As in an intersection? Or are you saying there's just a random stop sign in the middle of a straight stretch of deserted road with no intersections or crosswalks?

I've flagged only one segment ever. Was a 15km loop. The loop was

1) All on MUP that is frequently used
2) Crossed into/across the properties of 2 public grade school grounds
3) Crossed through THREE public city parks (one of which is an active baseball/softball complex)
4) Went through a private housing development park always in use by pedestrians and residents (surrounded by houses) with lake.
5) Had legal street crossings of 3 major 6-lane arterial city streets
6) Crossed probably a dozen private and public parking driveways
.
.
.
.
And somehow someone thought that was a good idea.



Runners are nuts. Tour de Nebraska just ended, and this year there were more crazy people who liked to go running after a 100km bike stage. Running is something best reserved for exiting burning buildings, or getting somewhere in a pinch when you bike is broken.

SloButWide 

I grew up in a large family, so I'd change it to "Running is something best reserved for exiting burning buildings, and being first in line for beer, chow, or the potty".

Back on topic, I once read the autobiography of Pamela Reed, an ultrarunner. She was an anorexic in High School who channeled her compulsions into running. Her training regimen was 3-4 six mile runs a day.

From Wikipedia:

• In 2002 Reed was the first woman to become the overall winner of the Badwater Ultramarathon. She subsequently repeated as overall winner of the race in 2003. In 2002, her win also set the women's course record.[2]
  
• In 2003, she set the women's record for the USATF 24-hour track run, which she still holds.[citation needed]
  
• In 2005, she completed a 300-mile run without sleep. She completed the run in slightly less than eighty hours.[citation needed]
  
• Reed is the current female American record holder in six-day marathons after completing 490 miles in the Twelfth-Annual Self-Transcendence Six-Day Race in New York. She completed the multiday race on Saturday, May 2, 2009.[2]

Phil_gretz

Where can I buy an Enrico Pizzi jersey? I want to wear one.

John_V 

Last year was the last time Tampa will host the Double Ironman event. I used to think these people are nuts. They started on Friday morning and ended sometime on Sunday afternoon going pretty much non-stop.

The girl mentioned in the OP's first post is Amanda Coker who is doing her world record ride here in Tampa. I've ridden with her on a few occasions and she is averaging a 19-20 mph average speed over a 238 mile daily ride. Today is her 45th official day of her record attempt and will break 10,000 miles, if she hasn't already done so by the time I post this. She only needs 29,604 miles to break the record, which she will have by October if nothing goes wrong. She also plans on getting as close to the men's record of 75,070 miles, set by Kurt Searvogel, in Jan 2016, also here in Tampa, by the end of her year. Now that's crazy!