Originally Posted by
valygrl
Well, thanks Heathpack, for the nice words, and putting nice words in my mouth
So here's what I took from the original post:
"Some places I ride, I am one of the fast people on Strava, and other places I'm one of the slow people. How come?"
The tl;dr version of my answer (as above) - you're using the wrong ruler to measure yourself, so don't bother.
My take on it is that use of strava doesn't necessarily represent either the general population of cyclists in an area or the people you might want to actually compare yourself to, and on top of that, it doesn't even really fairly represent competition in that one place, because conditions change.
Some places will have adopted the Strava culture more - more technology, more high speed internet, more access to and interest in tech tools like GPS/Garmin bike computers, more money to spend on those things. The self-selected population of people who use strava isn't going to be evenly distributed across the cycling population everywhere. It's not going to match the distribution of cyclists. Bay Area - everyone has a Garmin. Boulder - everyone has a Garmin and a power meter. Milan - I dunno. Middle of nowhere in rural Italy - I dunno. Majorca - everyone is a pro, and you are at the bottom of the leaderboard. Middle of nowhere in India - I have really no idea. Africa? Probably lots of KOMs out there for the taking.
Trying to compare yourself on strava is pretty pointless, as Heathpack pointed out, conditions vary, population adoption of strava varies, population adoption of cycling varies.
If you want to know how you rank (which is what I read as the most salient point of your question) - you have to go compete directly. On the same day. In the same race. Even the time recorded isn't really a good measuring stick - what about drafting? Wind? I barely every use Strava, but I have a QOM from a ride I did in Arizona when I had bronchitis and asthma and couldn't breath and could barely pedal. Does that mean I'm the fastest chick to ever ride that stretch? Hell no, other women on the trip I was on were leaving me in the dust, but they didn't post it on Strava.
So - pin on a number, or resign yourself to the fact that your ruler isn't calibrated and is therefore worthless.
It's funny how just the mention of Strava can get people off on the wrong foot.
Most of what you say I completely agree with. For instance, what you say about Boulder, Majorca, India, etc. gets at what I was wondering about, but I was hoping to get beyond the more or less obvious to a sense of how else road cycling communities may vary. Strava was just evidence of
something, and I was wondering if anyone with experience had any sense of whether it was something more than just the degree of adoption of Strava, as @
K.Katso suggests. On the one occasion when we rode with a large number of others - along the route ahead of one of the Giro stages - it seemed that most everyone was well-prepared, whereas on similar rides here in the states, there would have been many more riders who were obviously less well-prepared. Think of all the folks you see walking their bikes up the steepest hills on charity events. The only times I saw that there, it was other tourists. Why is that, I wonder? Maybe if it had been a charity event instead of something associated with the Giro, it would have been different, eh? But do they even have so many charity events in other places as we do in the states, or is road cycling elsewhere more or less "serious business?"
For some reason, you thought I was concerned about how I measured up - despite the title being "Comparison of road cycling
Communities" By the way I have pinned a number on plenty of times, and I know I suck
at racing. I don't need Strava to tell me that.