Strava age discrimination protest
 

Two years now Strava has promised more age groups. Help us old farts by dropping your premium service until they get it done. Meanwhile I look for other ways to find out how I am doing in the Old Fart Club. Map My Ride has a challenge running that allows you to filter 70+ and males only. Join the USO Mission 2.4 and if your MMR history goes back far enough you will get a pretty good idea of where you stand out of over 2,500 over 70 males. Challenge runs until Sep 12. Join and beat me - at 78 I am currently 48 out of over 400 over 70 males and 2,850 of 98,318 total riders. I'd say that's a pretty good sample. The Challenge - Mission 2.4 | MapMyFitness

I agree with you. 45 to 54 is a pretty wide range of ages. I'm 54 and in some segments, I'm in 9th position for my age group but would be first in the 55-64.

On Strava I'm fine with knowing where I am in the overall segment. So many people our age are deliberately smelling the roses that it presents a skewed picture of competitive performance. IMO.

Congratulations on your accomplishments!!! :thumb: :thumb:

Only 67 here, on Strava but no Premium and don't think I will even though got the "one month free" notice today. :foo:

Fwp

I've thought of activating the free premium month just to screen capture the local heat maps then let it end. Maybe watch some suffer scores. But not enough for me right now to do the premium pay to play, the free fits my needs currently.

Sorry to the OP, maybe if I activate the free month, then at the end say "sorry but I don't like the age group divisions so I'll cancel".

Strava seems too unresponsive to many reasonable user requests so I'm not inclined to pay for a premium membership. Every time I'm curious about whether Strava has a particular feature I read the user questions and Strava representatives' responses... and it's virtually always negative. "Nope, we ain't got that, no plans to incorporate it. Thanks for asking and please let us know if you have any other feature requests that we can ignore."

Seems like Strava has some issues with customization and scalability.

So I use Strava mostly as social media, to keep up with what friends are doing. I log some rides and use some data to get a guesstimate of my own progress, but I don't worry about the rest.

And it seems to blow smoke up our butts. The data would indicate I'm doing better that reality proves.

I can get a quick progress check on my fitness relative to my age group just by joining a local fast club's B group ride. Most of 'em are my age, some older. I still can't hang with 'em. I tried a 50 mile route with them Saturday but dropped out after 10 miles and the first two climbs. I rode a variation of the same route but at my own pace, around 15 mph. Can't hang with their 17 mph average.

I can check their times on segments where I struggle and see they're literally twice as fast on climbs. So while I can hang with them on flats and downhills, I'll get dropped on hills. That tells me all I need to know for now.

We are fast or we aren't. Age groups enable self delusion.

OP, there is a 65+ group in Strava in case you are interested in joining.

I enter the National Bike Challenge every year and I was using Endomondo to upload my rides to the NBC web site. For some reason, that started to fail to upload so I went with MapMyRide. That also failed to upload after a while so I went with the last option they had, and that was Strava. This year, you must have a Strava account to have your rides uploaded to it or they won't show up on the NBC web site. No more manual entries. NBC actually requires a Strava account to log into it. If it wasn't for the NBC, I wouldn't even give Strava a second look.

I already pay for Training Peaks. Premium Strava doesn't offer me anything worth paying for.

When I was just 66 I found the Strava age groups useful, but at 73 not so much so I dropped the premium membership when there was no movement to add the additional age categories. I have an interest in assessing certain segment times relative to others my age and without the relevant age categories, Strava is much less useful for me. Now, it is useful for just mileage/elevation totals and for comparing my history on certain segments.

I don't think I'll be doing the "free" trial period. Thought it was for a month, but then I get to the upgrade page it shows 14 day trial period. Then they want all the billing and payment and credit card info which I won't provide unless I decide to pay for it.

So, to the OP, I will protest vicariously. POWER TO THE AGE GROUPERS!!!

I know that is why I started premium many years ago. But I am now 78 - BIG difference. Most of the time I was dead last in the rankings and I know I am not that bad. Dropped premium several years ago.

That is a lonely thought.

This is not an issue with me. I've got one KOM (on a segment only 34 riders have hit, and almost half the "attempts" are me so... not a popular route. Oh, and most of the others were on a group ride led by me a while back). I don't really care were I fall in the grand scheme of things; I mostly just like to see when I've set a new personal best.

(But at least I'm faster than canklecat. Except when I hit an armadillo.)

I too don't know why I'd want to compare just the people in my age group. I'd rather see how I compare to the stats of riders 20 years younger.

But does Strava not show the age of the rider at all? I thought I remember MapMyRide.com showing the age of the rider in it's segment stats with just a free membership. Didn't take long to see where I sat among the folks my age. But that was over three years ago when I used MapMyRide regularly.

Don't tell Strava this... but my thought for increasing the numbers of Premium subscribers would be that they'd only hold your data for... 2 years or so. So if you like looking back at 5 years of your favorite segments, you'd have to pay up. Strava could keep the data so you'd get it back if you let it expire and re-join.

I think most people buy Premium just to say thanks for a great app. Trophy cases and sorting segments by weight or age just doesn't seem to have much value.

I haven't raced since I was a midget (before they eliminated the category).

Now that I am officially over the hill, I thought about racing again, but there are a lot of fast 50 year olds out there. Can we pass a rule that all the OTHER 50 year olds must buy beach cruisers and ride their age? :50:

Most of my hard Stava segments are in a small city where I can still get into the top 10 if I try. Oh, and ride smart :)

That was my rationale.

I've never paid for the premium membership. So, just for you, I'll continue to not pay for it.

I agree they're unresponsive to requests. For instance, my buddy rides a velomobile. He's as interested in tracking his performance as anyone else is, but when he logs his rides someone always flags them. Fairings are against the rules! As if drafting in group sprints isn't? He's requested a separate class for velos, even if there's no age groups with it, but no reply from Strava.

The velo fellow could just hide his rides from the leader boards. He could still compare his segment times.

Yeah, the unresponsiveness to reasonable feature requests is what puts me off.

More tags. How hard can that be? Tags have been a thing since Hector was a pup.

Or at least reliable auto-keywords. It would be much easier to find old rides to check data. Sometimes word search works for ride titles and descriptions, but not always.

More bike types and configurations (flat bar, riser or drops?) to better correspond with power estimates.

There's no way my upright comfort hybrid and lighter flat bar hybrid should have the same power estimate. And the power estimates for my flat bar hybrid show I consistently average over 200 watts, which ain't even close to accurate. The road bike estimate of around 120 watts is closer to accurate for the flat bar hybrid as well. If I could crank out a real 200 watts on the flat bar hybrid my average speed on the road bike would be closer to 20 mph rather than the actual 16 mph.

Power estimates on Strava are worthless. Buy a PM if you care about wattage.

Dang,
I was planning to build one to compensate for my age :eek:

Is that an official Strava rule, or something made up by local cyclists?

If Strava encourages flagging velomobiles, recumbents, or anything considered beyond "normal" then they need more categories.

If it is just some locals that abuse flagging privledges, then Strava needs an appeal and recourse option.