Strava at the University Road Race

This last Sunday, Velo Promo in the Bay Area put on an excellent race, the University Road Race at UC Santa Cruz. It’s a circuit race, where each hilly lap was a little over 2 1/2 miles — longer and hillier than your typical short, flat criterium lap. You would climb about 350 feet, then quickly descend the same amount, and continue this pattern a dozen or more times depending on your race category.

Last year there were 4 entrants who uploaded their race data to Strava, including myself — actually, I recall there were only 2 of us who uploaded near race-day, the others were “historic” uploads. This year we had a whopping 21 Strava-ites (can someone out there suggest a better term?) upload their ride date from Sunday’s race. What a difference a year makes!

Strava members put up some very impressive results (see the full race results here). I’ve ordered the list below by each racer’s average lap time and included the racer’s overall result, race category, and their fastest lap time:

It’s interesting to see how different racers across different categories compare. A few caveats: some categories raced more laps than others (e.g., Pro did twice as many as Masters Cat 4), and I didn’t verify these results. It’s very possible some of these times include warm-up or cool-down laps.

It’ll be cool when Strava builds features to analyze performance across riders, such as a race summary page (although we’re not promising anything soon…).

Congratulations to all the Strava racers!