My Strava hotspots

Smart watch = dumb owner

The latest saying in the outdoors community is? If it’s not on strava it didn’t happen some folk go absolutely nuts for it, analysing data of all sorts by people all around the world, of course with every social media there is also others that like to distance themselves from putting up any sort of personal information, I enjoy being part of the strava community but can also see why others wouldn’t What is Strava? it’s an American internet service for tracking human exercise which incorporates social network features. It is mostly used for cycling and running using GPS data. Strava uses a freemium model with some features only available in the paid subscription plan, I had only been using the free version for years but last year I paid for a plan to gain some features

personally, I love it I think it’s great to see friend’s activities it almost makes me share in their adventures, I like to think they get to share in mine; this is friends from all over the world that I can see, from the boys in new Zealand’s cycling an Australian mate runs Kim’s cycling in Germany and graces runs in New York, Sheila and bobs hikes around the highlands and islands then of course there’s my friends from all over the UK also, The watch is really simple to use, once you learn what the five buttons around the face are for then use it often it’s the regular use for me that is key, if I don’t do activities then I forget which buttons do which functions, I have became really good with it now for activities anyway; it’s a simple press of a button then two others to scroll through to choose an activity, then push the start button and I am off; the watch then logs all the data of my activities then pressing stop at the end of that activity, the data is immediately uploaded via Bluetooth to my phone which updates it to strava, I think this is magical! this instant uploading onto the internet for all my friends worldwide that are on strava to see, seconds after getting out the water off the bike or down from a hill hike There are 19 activities to choose from on my Garmin smart watch, everything from hike bike run swim climb row etc, I recently had a cracking day out swimming at lovely loch Ard, which of course I logged the open water swimming on strava, along with some photos that day something I rarely do on strava, I also got a shot off Sheila’s stand up paddle board that day, this was my first time on a SUP! making it the second last activity on my smart watch that I had not previously used, this now leaves only golf as an activity on the watch I have yet to do, I have absolutely no intentions of playing golf just to tick this box though as I’ve no time for that sport, I was glad to tick the activity box using Sheila’s SUP, I’ve been wanting to give that a go for years, I loved it and felt proud of how well I done for it being my first time on one, I also had the chance to try my new snorkel mask out that day, it was really good I am looking forward to giving it a sea trial

There was a bit of a world-wide craze of running every street of cities and towns, I liked the sound of this and decided I wanted to do it for my home town, which I duly set out and done logging every run over a few weeks round all the streets of my village, I also went on to do all the streets in the town of Brae on Shetland where I was working. There are times I feel I would like to expand that running experiment to be all the streets of my area of the town of Falkirk! This is only really an outside possibly of ever being done as I prefer running trails these days, in order for me to see all these street runs done over consecutive days, I had to upgrade my strava to include a feature called a heat map. This clever tool enables you to put all your activities on one map with the red line getting brighter the more times you do an activity around a certain loop, if you do the same route often enough it goes white hot

If you zoom in on an area of your activities heat map, you get a great view of all the streets it’s like looking down on a city all brightly lit up at night, I love seeing my activities in this way it makes my year’s subscription payment worthwhile, that along with a way of saying thanks for all those years I used the excellent strava App for free, Another feature I love is when you zoom out of the street sized picture and choose to show all activities, zoom it out to for example the size of a country like Ireland- I can see my whole red line of my cycle route down the length of Ireland, it`s the same red line for the Hebway and now my NCN1 route etc, its such a shame this app wasn’t around when I done my LEJOG C2C and other pre App days cycle tours, when you zoom out even further to Europe wide it shows dots of how many activities in a given area or country. For example, there’s a red dot in the area of the alps at the Swiss Italian French border, showing six ski holidays taken in that area; if I zoomed in on that dot I would see them in better detail, but it’s great for me to see my numbers of activities spread right across Europe skiing cycling and running, my red dots when zoomed out this far around Scotland show about six hundred activities dots, this includes my hillwalking and loch swimming activities; this pleases me to know that these activities are all digitally stored,

my big red dot over Shetland shows two hundred and fourteen activities, I find it really cool to zoom in on the Shetland map, it shows red lines all over the archipelago like veins on a body builder’s arms, with all my cycling and trig point bagging fun around the islands there are other features to the smart watch that I have yet to use for example- the navigation App? its possible for me to download a route to my watch which allows you to navigate trails using the watches GPS like a map and compass! I really need to get around to learning how to use this tool for future adventure plans; like the cape wrath ultra and completing my Munro round, I also never look at the data for performance enhancing purposes data from the heart rate monitor pace, steps, cadence, ascent. You can use that stuff to monitor your training progress but I never do. I feel certain that in the future these things will monitor your health and tell you when your ill or lack something nutritionally? And then I will be running along the road arguing with it!

Getting kudos! I love getting kudos; this is when a friend views your activity on strava and gives you the thumbs up, I will apologise to my friends on here that regularly give me kudos, because I am very haphazard at looking at other peoples activities and rarely give kudos, I apologise for this getting lots of praise while hardly giving any is a bit unfair, however thank you anyone who has read this and also gives me kudos I truly do appreciate it,