Author Topic: Strava Premium - Is it worth it?  (Read 8271 times)

Re: Strava Premium - Is it worth it?
« Reply #25 on: 10 June, 2016, 07:07:31 pm »
"Strava refuse to say how many members they have, and how many of them are premium." - what!, why say it as if they are some evil organisation hiding things for nefarious reasons rather than a commercial company wondering how to polite tell you its none of your business.

Working for a software company its also always amazing how some customer seem to think new features should just happen without the developers needing to somehow get paid for those strange things like eating, drinking and having somewhere to live.

Personally I love Strava, much more fun than Garmin though I still use both.


Re: Strava Premium - Is it worth it?
« Reply #26 on: 10 June, 2016, 07:12:19 pm »
I very much doubt many places are buying. The transport / GIS people I know (uni/ council/ combined authority) are very sniffy about that data.

Jo would know more. Be interested to hear his thoughts.

Re: Strava Premium - Is it worth it?
« Reply #27 on: 13 June, 2016, 09:10:31 am »
I had Strava Premium for a year but didn't renew it. My reasons were:-

* Incomplete stats
It doesn't give me everything I wanted, specifically peak power intervals (5s, 1m, 5m, 20m) - I had to go find them by hovering over the graphs and then copying them elsewhere.

* Fitness & Freshness chart focuses on cycling only
Useless for me as a large chunk of my training is running and swimming and doing a 3h run made no change to my fitness and freshness chart (it had a huge effect on my legs and tiredness though!)
I made my own simple CTL/ATL/form chart using Google Docs that I can tweak as I want

* Buggy interpretation of running data from some Garmin watches
I found a bug with the way Strava interprets data from Garmin devices when the Garmin doesn't record lat/lon data for various points. I added my info (with hand crafted example data files that showed the problem and how it could be spotted and mitigated) to the bug that someone else had logged and hundreds of people had signed up to saying "I've got this problem too" and, 2 years later, they still haven't fixed it. Garmin Connect doesn't have the same problem.

What would happen is that some Garmin watches would stop logging lat/lon data on every trackpoint despite you still moving and there being no reason for the watch to lose satellite signal. Even though 30 seconds later it would start logging lat/lon points again (and you'd be 90 meters further away - consistent with running at 10kph-ish) Strava would count you as being stopped for those 30 seconds because it trusted lat/lon data over everything else - no lat/lon = not moving. This would happen a few times over the course of a run and so runs where I would be moving for a full 60 minutes would be recorded as only being ~55 minutes long. The distance was correct, and so it would claim I was quite a bit faster than I was. And there's no way to correct it once it's uploaded; I had to convert the .fit to .tcx, scrub that clean of invalid data and then upload. Garmin Connect had no problem with the same data and correctly interpreted it.

* No way to edit/reclassify data. It's quite common for runs (especially measured races) to come up short on a GPS some times (most of the time the GPS measures a course as long but not always). So a half marathon might appear as 21.04km, but if you upload that then you haven't run a half marathon and there's no way to tell Strava "yes it was, just call it a HM". Garmin Connect thankfully has this.

* It didn't keep track of weight properly, you only had one weight, which meant tracking W/kg over time was useless/impossible
* Same for FTP. Once you change your FTP it used to rewrite history and chance the "training impact" (e.g. TSS scores) for old activities based on the new FTP value

* Visualisation and stats from swimming activities is dreadful
Various calculations are way off too (it doesn't interpret rest periods properly)
Running isn't much better (not that I use much of the Running Dynamics stats from the later chest straps)

The alternatives (Garmin Connect, Golden Cheetah, my own Spreadsheet) don't do everything I want either on their own, but between them (and the non-Preimum Strava) they cover what I need so I don't have to pay any money (I've sort of paid for Garmin Connect by buying Garmin devices).

I use:-

Strava (free): Social aspect; I follow people I know and they follow me so we can see what each other is up to
Strava (free): Training log of total hours swim/bike/run each week
Garmin Connect: Historical log of activities with full detail
Garmin Connect: Records, goals and workouts that can be sync'd to Garmin watch (Forerunner 920xt)
Golden Cheetah: Power analysis for cycling (haven't investigated the latest Golden Cheetah stuff for Triathlon training). I only use/understand a fraction of what Golden Cheetah can tell me, but even that fraction is 10 times what Strava can tell me.
My own spreadsheet: Getting most stuff in one place to track and graph
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

thing1

  • aka Joth
    • TandemThings
Re: Strava Premium - Is it worth it?
« Reply #28 on: 17 June, 2016, 06:07:35 am »
The thing I do like about Strava Premium's Fitness&Freshness graph is it has an OK model for HR as well as power based TSS. I don't do long distance rides with power meter (getting them on a tandem is a pita) so this is next best option. It means for the rest of my cycling career I can alway compare how I'm currently doing to what will be locked in forever as my most-fittest day (that's be 1 year ago...). I'm not sure I really want to have that hanging over me forever though which will probably be the reason I eventually decide not to renew!

The fact it doesn't correctly track FTP with time is a fairly major flaw in it.


i also used Golden Cheetah but it's not so convenient to dip into.

simonp

Re: Strava Premium - Is it worth it?
« Reply #29 on: 17 June, 2016, 08:54:35 am »
TrainingPeaks has hrTSS which I find very useful for computing total training load between cycling and rowing.