Henley Royal Regatta Strava Segment

Walking the entire length of Henley Reach on regatta Saturday carrying a heavy picnic in blistering heat doesn’t help at all when one needs the GPS information for the Henley Royal Regatta course. Having never rowed the old course myself (on my bucket list) I could not make a Strava segment on Henley reach…… until this point.

Luckily a Strava user has helped me out and shared a .gpx file with me of their 2016 row.

This has also happened with Peterborough Head, so any one else wanting to have a Strava segment of a head race or regatta and so can share workout files and official timing contact me on twitter.

Great thing when setting up segments with very accurate official timing is you can tweak the segment until you are as close as possible to getting the same time measured. The .gpx file has been created by the rower using a GPS watch. All GPS devices have different sampling rates and varying amounts of data is stored during a workout. With the file supplied it appears that GPS points are stored on the device every 4 seconds. Getting the start and finish in the correct spot is not easy but I have got within 1 second of the official time. For GPS accuracy this may be as close as it can get for Strava segment timing. I may have another go if I get a file with more GPS data but for now it will do.

Now the segment has been created anyone can make use of it. If you have a row at Henley recorded with a GPS device simply upload it to Strava and the segment time will be calculated. If you already have the row on Strava simply edit it and change it to another activity ‘run’ is normally good, save it. Then edit it again and change it back to ‘rowing’ save again and Strava will recalculate all the segments in that activity. You should find the Henley Course segment then shows up.

Due to the stake boat start at Henley the Strava segment may trigger when rowing up past the start. If this happens the Strava activity can be cropped so that the false trigger is deleted, be careful that you do not crop any of the actual row. If you wish to keep the row up to the start splitting the Strava activity may be preferred.

Garmin watches can sync with a Concept 2 PM5 monitor and record the data of your indoor row with the Erg IQ (Beta) Garmin connect IQ app. When on the water they can also measure stroke rate from the wrist without any need for any other sensors.
Garmin Forerunner 735XT GPS Multisport and Running Watch – £327.41
Garmin Forerunner 235 GPS Running Watch with Elevate Wrist Heart Rate – £215.99