As the riding season gets into high gear, here are a few tips on how to get the most out of each ride on Strava, avoid frustration, and avoid burnout.

1. No need to stop / start your Garmin mid-ride when taking a “natural break,” a photo or even a longer stop to munch a sandwich. The Strava system will automatically take out “resting” time, eliminating the consequence of forgetting to hit “start” afterwards and losing half your ride.

2. When scouting out a climb for a KOM (“King of the Mountain”), make sure you’ve checked on Strava to find out where it begins and ends. Sometimes the official end is at the end of a false flat after the steep part of the climb. We are working on new functionality that will allow you to create or modify start and stop points for a given climb or any segment of a ride. Until then, if you see a climb on Strava where you think we’ve got the wrong starting or ending point, just let us know what you think it should be (email support@strava.com) and we’ll take a look. If enough members agree, we’ll make the change in our climbs database.

3. If you’re the first one to ascend a categorized climb on Strava, then it is yours to name. Please give your climbs a locally acceptable and uniquely descriptive title so other members in the system will be able to search for them using commonly used names. While it’s understandably fun to let trash talk creep in to climb names, please save trash talk for the comment area. We are working on new functionality around naming ride segments which will give members more control. For now, if you see a climb that is unnamed and you want to name it, or you have a suggestion for the “right” name for an already-named climb, just let us know (email support@strava.com).

4. Easy rides are necessary for recovery and sanity. Before Strava, you knew what was good for you and you probably did it. Now that every one of your rides is a shot at glory on Strava, it’s tempting to hit every hill hard to see what kind of damage you can do to the KOM leader-board. But, you’ll do more damage on Strava and less to yourself if you pick your efforts carefully ahead of time and put in recovery rides like you know you should.

Please keep your ideas and comments coming in – Strava is built for and by cyclists!

Feedin’ the addiction

Davy Kitchel