The email that came in from Chris Milliman was pretty benign: “Keller, I think you should have a look at this new product. Heard of it? Strava.com. Check it out!”  So I blame him for my newfound addiction…

Strava is crack. It is addictive on many levels but I’ll get to that in a minute. What is Strava? It’s your ride ‘repository’ done right. We’ve all seen and likely used various web-based tools (does anyone use desktop-installed products any more?) that offer unbelievable amounts of data and features. As a software professional…and a data geek at heart…they are pretty impressive in fact. And these tools, when understood and leveraged correctly, help us become better cyclists. Providing and presenting the data in ways to easily demonstrate your strengths, weaknesses…your progressions and volume.

But for me, riding and my cycling life in general is social. It’s what my buds and I do. And that is what Strava is. It was a product built by cyclists to be social ‘from the ground up.’ It’s about you and your performances and achievements which can be mapped to others who’ve ridden over the same turf. Some of the highlights I find fun to use in Strava:

Your Achievements:

Training’s hard enough as it is. And rarely do you get a back pat from anyone…save your dog who likes to lick the salt of your sweat from you when you return from your ride. But Strava catalogues all of your rides and will tell you how you’ve improved over the sections you care about…like that problematic steep section at the top of your local climb. The gamification they’ve added is thoughtful and truly gets you going harder to ‘get the prize’ when you return home and upload your workout.

Creating Segments and Rider Comparisons:

Mapping your whole ride and getting total distance is one thing, but what about that section from ‘the old cottonwood tree to the town limit sign’? In Strava-speak, that’s called a segment and you can create as many of them as you want and share them with the Strava community. Moreover, how did you compare against a buddy of yours on that sprint or climb….even if he did it last week…or last year? below shows Strava’s simple to use interface for comparing riders on segments. You can see the orange marker (me) on the map and on the elevation chart and the blue dot (the segment record holder) and how he drops my ass. Now you have animated EVIDENCE on how you erased your friends on that climb on your Saturday AM group ride. Awesome.

Followers/Following and Privacy:

For those of you kids who are on The Facebook or use that tweet thing, you’ll understand the importance of privacy. And Strava enables you to ensure you are as open…or as private…as you want to be. Approve those you want following you, mark rides private or share as you see fit.

Bloggers Rejoice! Embeddeable Rides:

The Strava platform enables bloggers or websites in general to add in interactive objects like you see below to keep viewers on your site:

All of this adds up to quite a fun and compulsive to use product. You can’t help but find yourself filtering through your data, organizing and adding comments about your rides. Keeping it all nice and tidy as it’s easy to organize. Voyeuristically, you’ll find yourself using the comparison features to see you versus your friends…and the work you need to do to get faster! It’s addictive. Be careful.

A few days ago I posted about the EAS Sports Nutrition ‘Unstoppable Tour’. To re-cap, the ‘tour’ boils down to sending a man, Sam Tickle, across our country doing a different sport every day for 30 days. EAS’ job is to keep this guy healthy and recovered day after day with the appropriate, body work, nutrition and supplements. On Day 13, the EAS crew visited Boulder CO, and in fact swung by my house. Funny enough, Sam and crew visited on a Wednesday...and you know what that means: The Wednesday Worlds training ride. We’d ensure that Sam would be burning calories for sure trying our sport, cyclocross, for the first time. Enjoy…

By now, you’ve likely all seen or heard about the events that have taken place in Brazil during one of their many Critical Mass rides. Brazilians are biking mad. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. Trust me they like their bikes (and their Red Bull). And with that love for riding, it is so painful to watch and read about this obviously insane man, who ‘had had enough’ and decided for himself that driving directly through the collected mass of riders was his solution to rowdy, problematic cyclists blocking his way…causing massive destruction to bodies, bikes and the spirits of humans who could not believe a person could do this. You can see what occurred that night here. Yet I warn you while the images are not necessarily deeply graphic, they are so disturbing I can not bare to watch this any longer.

So what’s the point of this post? It’s not to fan the flames of driver-vs-cyclist. Quite the opposite. It’s more of an exposition on ‘staying safe’ as a cyclist…or as safe as possible by making good decisions when you are typically worked from riding hard out on the open roads. When we don our helmets, shoes and road bikes and set out for our ride, we immediately put ourselves at risk. Even in bike-mad towns like mine (Boulder), we are still a happy little minority of blissful humans who are focused on on improving our health and our life experience…with the bike as the tool to help us achieve those things. As of late, I’ve come to re-fall back in love with my road bike again. I don’t know what it is…maybe neglect. Maybe some odd cyclic thing where every 2 years I go through this mad ‘spring classics fever’ and I just need to ride my roadie. I am now also remembering why I am a mountain biker having put in many hours on the road this winter…

With this re-found lust for skinny tires, I have been heading out on the numerous group rides I used to do to get in some fast paced training. Boulder has a ton of group rides. On any given one, you’ll see a gaggle of top local pros head out with what are truly (and obviously once the pace cranks up) newbies who are amped to get their ‘Tour de France’ on. It’s very unique to be able to gain this experience for someone new to the sport and get a ‘taste’ of the tempo and the discipline required to ride in a pack. Many of the group rides are as close as you’ll get to race pace without donning a number. Yet, it’s dangerous at best as the pace heats up with overlapping wheels and generally bad decisions being made by folks who are pinning themselves, getting hypoxic and not able to put safety and sensibility first. They do not have the experience to rely upon when their heart rates are rising north and their heads drop down. In these moments, I question my sanity being in these rides and either try to pin it to be in the lead group who will naturally separate and carry on safely, or bail. It’s just not worth it.

During these rides, every time and without fail, I see enraged drivers which our group rides invariably cause. We veer out into traffic, have sloppy pace-lines, ride two abreast awkwardly where the riders on the right are literally in the middle of the shoulder pushing their partner to the left out into traffic. Lines of cars stack up behind, horns begin to blare, middle fingers shoot out of windows, side mirrors get a bit to close for comfort as the driver nails the accelerator after FINALLY seeing a window to get around the weaving peloton.

We do not own the road in this way. We are not sharing as the signs all over town say to do. Open roads are not closed race courses for our follies.

Above and beyond it all what I witness…continually…are the equally impulsive moves by cyclists who are made irate by these motorists and ‘their audacity of blowing their horns at us. I’ll give them a piece of my mind.’ We’ve all seen it: the horn blows or that mirror gets a bit too close and the rider sprints to catch up with the driver at the next light and unloads an entire magazine of obscenities, clenched fists, and hate. It may sound like I’m defending motorists here. I’m not. I am stating the obviously situation:

WE CAN NOT CONTROL ANYONE ELSE BUT OURSELVES!

When will we get that? And we doesn’t necessarily = cyclists here. We = humans. We = people. We = citizens. While we can not do anything about getting plowed from behind by a motorist who is texting while driving, we as cyclists can control what WE are doing and how WE behave on the roads. Am I in traffic? Am I potentially causing a potential wreck by overlapping wheels? Am I absolutely crazy-eyed angry at that driver who had the audacity to blare their horn at me? At that moment, you can control you and your emotion. You have no idea who that person is, their potential insanity, their emotional state and ‘need to get past the herd of crazy bikers,’ their willingness to roll down the window after you chased them down only to be staring down the barrel of their .44 magnum. Lastly, don’t assume I think you’re cool or doing the right thing on our group ride when you make the choice ‘for us cyclists’ when you chase down the car. You’re being an idiot as far as I am concerned.

I hate to over-dramatize here but it’s how I see things. Society and peoples’ emotional states have become extremely brittle. There is a waning lack of compassion or general understanding of what others needs are. We can contribute to decreasing the contention by acting responsibly or if you truly need to think defensibly, by acting with a sense of letting the idiot go on with their lives after they got too close to you. Reduce conflict, reduce emotion and think clearly before you act. If there was a dangerous driver who you feel almost took you out, report them. There are tons of ways now to do this. Use those mobile phones and shoot their license plates. Save the anger for later…and miraculously when you save the anger, watch as it dissipates when you let it go and you complete that glorious ride with satisfaction and joy. Most of all complete it safely to get back to your families and friends with everything…including your spirit…in tact.

This past fall we received word that EAS Sports Nutrition and a gaggle of their photographers and videographers would be swinging through Boulder…all in support of one ‘athlete’. This one athlete would be performing 30 sports in 30 days…something EAS referred to as their ‘Unstoppable Tour.’ Each day, the athlete, Sam Tickle (pictured below), would be surprised for what the next day’s sporting activity would be. And it would all be captured on film…in HD glory.

On his 13th consecutive day, good ‘ol Sam was introduced to our sport: cyclocross. Boulder was city & sport number 13th on on his way across the country performing an amazing array of random sports and athletic endeavors…all in a 30 day span. More feats of athleticism in a month than most do in their entire lives.

The morning of their Boulder visit, the EAS entourage arrived at my house with Suburbans and other vehicles packed to the gills with people and equipment. The crew came in and set up shop to film me getting Sam squared away with ‘cross equipment and advice…one of my Ridley bikes, Specialized shoes supplied by Boulder Cycle Sport, pedals supplied by Crank Brothers and a hell of a lot of encouragement and instruction on behalf of the Boulder ‘cross community. He was stoked to say the least and it was great to see his enthusiasm for ‘cross, having never seen the discipline of cycling before.

Today, March 1st, the Unstoppable Tour launched for us all to see. Day 13 in Boulder is not yet released, but I will post as soon as that video hits the wires. For now, come and enjoy Days 1-5. You’ll see day by day, video by video, how Sam is kept moving, going, pushing…all the while being monitored by sports PT’s and his health and nutrition maintained with EAS products. I must say, I would have been stoked to have been abused like this for 30 days. Click on the image below to get lost for a little bit watching the first episodes…