Well one more thing about having a tracking tool is that it tracks my heart rate (I wear the chest strap when I cycle). On windy days I just try to maintain the level of effort that I'd decided on for that ride, and don't pay that much attention to the actual speed.

A couple months ago I went into Strava and set a goal of riding 4000 miles during 2020. I then had a fairly catastrophic April as far as my cycling goes, getting out on less than half the rides I'd planned on doing. When I look at my profile data it not only shows how far I've ridden compared to this 4000 mile yearly goal, but also tells me how far behind the curve I am on that goal. As of right now it says I'm 597 miles behind the pace to complete that 4000 mile goal for the year. It was in the 600s a week ago, but I've been chipping away at it the last week as I started off May actually doing all the rides I'd planned to do. I'm about to go out and ride right now, and it will be satisfying to see that 597 mile deficit against my yearly goal drop again. It'll probably take me several months to whittle that deficit down to 0, and then I'm interested in seeing if Strava reports me being ahead of the curve.

You said you didn't know what a segment is. If you look at the Strava record for any of your rides, if you rode anyplace where a segment has been defined, it'll show you stats for those segments. Where I live there are Strava segments defined all over the place. Any ride I do on the roads where I live will result in anywhere from 10 to 20 or more segments pop up in my ride record. Any long stretch of road with some kind of natural start and end point (eg: between two major intersections a mile or three apart) is likely to have Strava segments already defined for it.

One really cool thing is that you can define your own segments (that's how they come to be: people define them). One practice of mine is that I define a Strava segment for any entire ride route that I'm going to ride frequently. I've defined 9 mile segments, 13 mile segments, 25 mile segments, 32, 54, etc. mile segments for routes I've done a lot. By having a segment defined for an entire ride (not just some small part of it) I have data now for entire ride routes that I've done a lot, and I can go see how my rides have gone on that route all the way back to when I first started riding that route. On these whole-ride segments that obviously start and end by my house, usually there won't be anyone but me on the leaderboard, though there are routes where several people show up because they rode it with me. In this case the "leaderboard" isn't really a competition, unless I'm competing with myself. It's nice to be able to see the fastest I've ever done that route, get a feel for my average times, etc.