Originally Posted by
TrojanHorse
That would be #3 and yes, I'd like to enjoy it until somebody fast accidentally takes it away.
As for altitude, I think the most reliable results are achieved using the garmin data with no correction (if you correct it, you're using survey data and if you are riding mountain roads and your position is off just a skosh you can really trash the results). The barometric data is pretty good and seems to vaguely correlate with what strava comes up with. I don't get too worked up about it anymore.
Who the heck is Jorge Almaguer? He rode a mountain bike over what is known as the "Fullerton Loop", something I've never done on account of not owning a MB. That route is vaguely in the same area I rode last night but it's not even close to "rode with" IMO. Oh well. I'm sure he had a good time.
I'm probably completely off base but...
Doesn't strava just take the data from your garmin? Or does it try to match it to existing 'known good' data? Before I set an elevation point, my rides (both strava and ride with gps) had really wacky starting elevations. After, very consistent and rwgps actually seems to have stopped giving me extra bonus feet of climbing (in fact now its reporting less than strava). ... I'll dig around on the web when I get some time and see if anyone documents how they do this.
As for 'rode with', I get that too - I think its 'so and so was out riding along the same route at the same time as you, and we're going to infer that you were riding together, aren't we brilliant' - NOT!
I'm definitely considering all my elevation data as suspect.