3 Days on the Right to Play Charity Ride

I’m a career runner with a few triathlons under my belt but I’ve never found the motivation for hours on my bike until now. Back in November I discovered the Strava community and a focal point which was a 3 country charity ride for Right to Play. Although having two small children at home restricted my training to times I alone could make, a Garmin device with GPS route tracking and heart rate measurements started to make each ride more interesting. Discovering Strava has made me feel like I’m part of a community of riders and allowed me to look at my own rides but more interestingly compare myself in the crowd as well.

Lone riding turned to amazement as on the 4th July I left my house and rode the 12 miles to St Pancras station and then met the 200 other riders who were all heading to the same event. I couldn’t help but thinking that this would have been even more interesting if all 200 riders had been riding together virtually during training and therefore natural teams could form. As it was a lot of the ride (see my personal blog for more of the story) was about riding with different groups and only on the third day did I feel truly comfortable with the team of 10 I found myself with and the day was great fun because of it!

So the ride was:

Day 1. Brussels to Bruges

Brussels to Bruges segment on Strava

Day 2. Bruges to Calais

Bruges to Calais segment on Strava

Day 3. Dover to London

Dover to London segment on Strava

A spectacular route and I hope that by following my maps others can discover this beautiful route.

Tour de France Stage 19 Challenge Question

UPDATE:  Results are posted below – DON’T READ if you don’t want to know the outcome of the stage 19 TT

Today’s Tour de France Challenge Question is:

In today’s last real contest between Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck, will Contador take time from Schleck or visa versa?  How much time?  Answers must be in before Andy leaves the start house.

• Tweet your answer to @stravaHQ
• We’ll post the winner on our blog

Closest answer wins.

What’s the Tour de France Challenge? We’re running a daily challenge for each remaining day of the Tour de France. Here’s how it works:

• Subscribe to our blog RSS feed, so that you can get notified as soon as a new challenge is posted.
• We’ll post a new challenge question daily with various prizes ranging from Strava t-shirts to Garmin Edge 500s!
• Once a new challenge is posted, follow the instructions on how to participate — we’re running some of the challenges on Twitter and some on Facebook.
• Send us your answer to the challenge question.
• We’ll post the winner on our blog.

Congratulations @olaf242 for picking Contador by 45 seconds – only 14 seconds off.
An aside – Contador is looking to win by exactly the margin he took from Schleck on stage 15 when Schleck dropped his chain and Contador attacked.!

Tour de France Stage 18 Challenge Question

Today’s Tour de France Challenge Question is:

What is the greatest finish line time gap recorded by a successful solo break in Tour de France history, by whom, and what stage of what year?

• Tweet your answer to @stravaHQ
• We’ll post the winner on our blog

First correct answer wins.

What’s the Tour de France Challenge? We’re running a daily challenge for each remaining day of the Tour de France. Here’s how it works:

• Subscribe to our blog RSS feed, so that you can get notified as soon as a new challenge is posted.
• We’ll post a new challenge question daily with various prizes ranging from Strava t-shirts to Garmin Edge 500s!
• Once a new challenge is posted, follow the instructions on how to participate — we’re running some of the challenges on Twitter and some on Facebook.
• Send us your answer to the challenge question.
• We’ll post the winner on our blog.

Congratulations @ozchrisb for being the first to tweet the answer I was looking for.
Answer:  ”José-Luis Viejo, who beat the peloton by 22 m 50s in the 1976 stage Montgenèvre-Manosque.”

This is the widely accepted answer; however, I feel more research is warranted as there may be some harder to find data in the early tours which surpass that.  I’ll hit the books and report back here what I find.  - feel free to post comments with answers and sources.

Thanks for all your answers.

Winners of the Tour de France Stage 17 Tourmalet Challenge!

Spoiler Alert! If you don’t want to find out the results for Stage 17 of the Tour de France, stop reading now and come back later!

First off, thanks to everyone who took the time to participate in this challenge — we hope you had fun!

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of our entries included both Schleck and Contador. They showed the world, and the peloton, that they are in a league of their own when the road tilts skyward.

The third choice proved to be more difficult. Interestingly, no one picked Ryder Hesjedal who ended 4th on the stage. His stock as a contender in the mountains is rising as fast as he climbs.

Finally, no one was able to nail the trifecta. 3 people came very close, and each had the same answer, so we used timestamps to separate first, second and third places.

Strava’s 3 winners:

All chose Schleck, Contador and Sanchez, or the 1st, 2nd and 5th place finishers on the day.

First Place Winner — Steve Shores

Prize — 1 Year of Strava + Garmin 500 Bundle

Second Place Winner — Dan Vigil

Prize — 1 Year of Strava + Garmin Edge 305 Bundle

Third Place Winner — Brett Lobree

Prize: 1 Year of Strava + Strava Arm Warmers (from the Strava Cycling Kit)

Congratulations to each of you! We’ll be contacting you shortly via Twitter about sending you your prizes.

Thanks again to everyone who took part. Stay tuned for more fun challenges…

Tour de France Stage 17 Tourmalet Challenge Question Posted!

Update:  The contest is now closed.  The riders have reached the start of the Tourmalet, so we won’t be taking any new tweeted entries.  We will post the contest results here on the blog later today.

Ready? Here’s the Stage 17 question…

Challenge Question: Pick the top 3 finishers for Stage 17.

Scoring: Answers will be scored based on the Tour de France green jersey competition point system (for a “high mountain” stage):

• 1st Place = 20 points
• 2nd Place = 17 points
• 3rd place = 15 points
• 4th place = 13 points
• 5th place = 12 points
• 6th place = 10 points
• with 1 point decrements all way down to 15th place being awarded 1 point.

The first place prize goes to the person with the highest total score. In the case of a tie, the person who submitted their answer first is the winner. If that doesn’t break the tie, we’ll resort to a random drawing. Second and third place prizes will be awarded to the next two highest scores, with any ties broken as described above.

Here is what you need to do to participate:

1. Send your answer to the challenge question to us via Twitter with the following conditions:

• Follow us on Twitter so that we can follow you back and receive your direct message (if you don’t, you won’t be able to DM us your answer) — http://twitter.com/stravahq
• Send your answer to us via DM (direct message) “d stravahq” and tag it “#tdfquiz”
• Make sure you send it via DM so that others can’t see your answer!

3. The Challenge will be closed to submissions at 33k from the finish on Thursday, July 22. We will announce closing of the Challenge on Twitter and our blog.

4. We’ll announce the Challenge winners on this blog.

Note: we’ll be using the timestamp, or order in which tweets are sent to us, as displayed by Twitter. In the past, there have been some perceived discrepancies in how Twitter timestamps tweets. If there is any discrepancy, we’ll just have to consider it bad luck — kind of like dropping a chain on a climb.