A few weeks ago at a dinner party, I got embroiled in a discussion about Strava culture.
Strava is a social-networking app for athletes. S, who insists he does not use social media, has been using Strava for years, and enjoys its social aspects.
I started using Strava two years ago, when I was searching for an app that would map my cumulative yearly miles. I ignore its social aspects.
I don't remember how the discussion began at the dinner party, but at some point, S mentioned that another Strava user had contacted him out of the blue to object that S couldn't possibly have completed a ride at the speed he had recorded.
It was true: that was the ride where S's brakes malfunctioned, causing a crash that briefly knocked S out and fractured both of his elbows. When he came to, he had somehow made it across the street onto a Good Samritan's porch. He phoned home to ask for a ride, and E and I drove out to the country road where he was waiting for us, bleeding and dazed. We loaded S and his bike into the car, and for the entire drive to the ER, he kept saying "I don't understand why I crashed; good thing I don't have to go to the ER this time... I don't understand why I crashed; good thing I don't have to go to the ER this time... I don't understand why I crashed; good thing I don't have to go to the ER this time..." Then we waited in the chilly ER for a few hours, while blood trickled down his shins and hands and face, until the adrenaline gave way to pain, and he was finally seen and diagnosed.
Anyway, at dinner, I commented that I thought it was weird that someone would bother contacting S about his excessive speed (which had been recorded by the Garmin attached to his bike in the trunk of our car on our way to the ER), in effect accusing S of being a cheater. I thought it was weirder still that S had responded by deleting the offending segment of his ride. Why not save it to remember the elbow-cracking ride, and the fun drive to the ER?
That's when I was taught that people use Strava to measure their own self-worth by comparing their speeds and distances to the speeds and distances of others.
S explained that people have died trying to win speed records on Strava--that people have ridden through red lights in order to be the fastest going down a particular hill, and instead of winning, they get hit by a car, or they mow down and kill pedestrians, or whatnot. It got so bad, he said, that Strava has made changes to how it defines "segments," to try to reduce the likelihood of virtual competitiveness killing someone. (This might be true, but all I could find by googling the topic were articles explaining changes to Strava's terms of use, which now require users to assume responsibility for their own stupidity, and to not sue the company.)
S and I each thought that social-networking app-induced deaths reinforced our own POV--his, that accurate records are necessary for competition; mine, that the only person you should be racing against is yourself.
My walking records are for my use only. If my Garmin watch can't find a satellite from inside, say, a slot canyon in Utah, and it adds some scraggly half miles trying to figure out where I am, that's my problem, not another slot canyonist's; I'm not going to delete the hike. I figure these sorts of bonus distances are compensated for by all the unrecorded miles I walk indoors. No one else on Strava would know that, but I don't need them to; I'm recording miles for myself, and if I can't trust myself, why should anyone else?
To emphasize my point, I mentioned the randomness of Strava's Local Legend status. Local Legends are people who complete the same segment the most times withing a 90-day period. Strava notifies me when I become a Local Legend, and again when--oh no!--someone takes the status away from me. These are often uninspiring segments--a random three block distance on an unremarkable street that some Strava user decided needed to be turned into a named segment.
When S and I visited Horseshoe Bend in Arizona in March 2022, I briefly held the Local Legend title for "most attempts completed" on the "To the Bend" segment. As I blogged then, "The number of 'efforts' was a whopping two, because we had 45 minutes between our arrival at the overlook and sunset, and decided to kill time by walking back to the parking lot to use the pit toilets, then walking back to the overlook again. The record was seized by another walker the very next day, who 'set the new bar,' also with '2 efforts,' so either she walked faster or peed faster."
My point was that Strava invents unnecessary, meaningless competition.
I present all of this backstory to explain why I was surprised to suddenly find myself caring about competition on Strava.
This past Friday, Strava emailed to tell me I was a Local Legend, for the segment "Glendale uphill - dead end to Clark."
Except that I wasn't the Local Legend. That honor went to someone who had walked the route nine times, while I had walked it only four.
Turns out Strava has two categories for Local Legends: (1) people Freud would call normal "all presumed male athletes" and (2) The Other "women." I thought maybe I was seeing these two categories because Strava knows I'm female, but it shows up this way on S's app too, and Strava knows he's male.
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| All athletes |
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| Women |
This struck me as even more obnoxious than the existence of Local Legends. Why should women need their own category for number of attempts for a random 3-block stretch of unremarkable road?
Moreover, we have neighbors who live on that stretch (the neighbors who hosted the dinner party!). They walk their dog every day, and surely have walked this segment more than nine times in the past 90 days. But they aren't Local Legends because they don't give a sh*t about Strava. The point, again, is that Local Legendhood is meaningless.
Nonetheless, being categorized as Other, a.k.a. female, ticked me off enough that on Sunday, when I needed to top off my walking miles for the week, I decided to walk back and forth along "Glendale uphill" for a cumulative total of six miles. Mostly what I thought, as I pummeled the now former Local Legend John S's record into the ground, was "this was fun at first, but now it's pretty boring."
When I got home, Strava congratulated me on becoming the Local Legend of not only "Glendale uphill - dead end to Clark," but also "Glendale: Markham to Knox."* Bonus! I guess this currently makes me a fourfold Local Legend, since being first in the category of non-Othered human also makes me first in the "women" category--which just goes to show how stupid all of this is.
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