Strava very much remains an incomplete record - it's just too much effort to go back and recreate everything, and for very little gain. Although in all honesty there wasn't much that I
did do before Strava, there was some mapmyrun recording!
See that very expedient line on the right hand of my screen? That's a mapmyrun GPS recording that I probably had to use GOTOES on to get timestamps, as I believe it was route only. This is from 2014, years before tiling!
The coastal walk, however, is obvious. It's also quite a significant event, so it's fitting that there's some record of it. The route is super obvious - and it's very useful for claiming some tricky coastal tiles. It's even nicely dated to the correct month of 2012.
Meanwhile, I
know that I've walked to the Fossil Forest (east of Lulworth Cove) before. However, I can't be sure of how far, particularly whether it actually got into that next tile. Almost certainly - but not certainly. Besides, I'm going to end up walking that piece of coastline anyway, to claim the definitely unvisited tiles further east, so there'd be no point in using imagery and such to try and recreate the walk.
After all, who would you be cheating but yourself? (Unless you're right at the top of the leaderboards). I don't feel like I'm cheating myself by recreating activities that I certainly have done - in fact, remembering these things can be quite fun. Just as long as you don't screw over segment leaderboards or anything, set the activity to followers only if necessary.
The whole point of this, at least to me, is to find and visit new routes and places, not to retrace an old route because it wasn't recorded "officially"!
What would have been cheating would have been to just GPS trace the Lulworth Ranges tile... but I didn't, I claimed that one fair and "square".
