App of the Month: Strava
Strava gives users the chance to bask in and share vast fields of data about their own progress and performance.
The medical community has made a cottage industry of comparing exercise to addiction. But nothing has yet been made of what’s emerging as a powerful cross addiction: information about exercise. For bicyclists and runners, there’s no more mighty gateway to this obsession than Strava, an ingeniously conceived app (for iPhone and Android) that gives users the chance to bask in and share vast fields of data about their own progress and performance. There is, perhaps, no healthier form of narcissism.
Strava is by no means the only fitness app that uses a smartphone’s GPS capabilities, but it stands out from the pack in two significant ways. First of all, it works: Until I discovered Strava, I sampled quite a few other biking apps, but none of them stuck because they tended to be glitchy. The thing that really got me hooked on Strava was the social networking. The app is free, as is unlimited use of its basic tracking and mapping functions. But for $6 a month (or $59/year), Strava gives you access to a powerful set of filters and analytical tools, which let you see how you stack up against other runners and riders of your same age, weight, and gender who are grinding around the same courses and up the same hills as you are. When paired with a cadence sensor and heart monitor (like the feature-packed Garmin Edge 800), it can also generate a full physiological report, which you can then post for all other users to see.
—
This article originally appeared in the November 2011 issue of Men’s Journal.
Follow us on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter: @MensJournal and @MJGearGuy
Posted by Dania
on 10:21. Filed under