Tweaks

Strava is a great multi sport platform. Its extremely large user base of cyclists and runners however does skew its features towards those sports.

This is a page of tweaks that Strava could do to make it more rowing friendly, and possibly friendlier to other sports outside of running and cycling. If you agree with any of these and you are a Strava user please click on the link to visit the Strava support page, once logged in on the support page with your Strava account vote for the feature to be implemented.

As you can see above you will see the box up and down, to vote for the feature click the up arrow.

Allow a Strava user to choose their ‘primary’ ‘default’ sport, offer other options other than running and cycling – In user settings the default sport can be change to more than the 2 default sports. Also within the apps you can set your primary sport so when you start an activity it is started as the sport you will eventually save it as.

Strava Club Pages showing stats for sports other than running, cycling and swimming – This is especially significant for club pages that are set up as ‘other’ such as a rowing club page. They are made for a specific sport so tracking the training in the sport will be significant for the club members. Currently Strava only includes running, riding and swimming distances and duration in the club statistics. Rowing club pages would be great if you could have rowing as a training volume statistic.

Being able to define a boat type – When it then came to leader boards for rowing/water sport segments you could then see what boat type was used to set the time. This may also be handy for other sports kayaking even cycling people may occasionally go out on a tandem.

Syncing from the Concept2 Logbook to Strava –  Its not a Strava tweak as such more a tweak to the Concept2 Online Log Book. I know concept2 are already working on this and hope it introduce it this year. The thread has some good discussion about how Strava could then display rowing data so that it is specific to rowing. Having imports coming from concept2’s could easily be the biggest influx of rowing activities to Strava. There are services that can pull data between the logbook and Strava such as Rowsandall.com and p729.com. It will be interesting to watch any tweaks from Strava when Concept 2 introduces it directly. DONE – LiveRowing also offer a Strava sync, so rows on a Concept2 can now relatively easily be uploaded to Strava – blog post to follow soon.

Sport Specific Icons – Strava has a shoe for running and a bike for cycling. Wiggly water lines seem to be appropriate for a multitude of sports from swimming to rowing and canoeing.

Just a little time spent on a different one for each sport would be great. If rowing indoors and out could be different it would be great for seeing what an activity was in the dashboard activity feed.

Head Course segment control – Making some segments official. This could give event organisers some control on the course the segment follows. Head races being able to control a segment to the point of advertising the event with a website link and having official sponsors for the segment.

Going a little further for rowing segments Strava down the line could allow for wider start and finish areas so that one segment can work for all lanes of a multi course regatta, I understand this may involve special programming so this would then be good to hand control of the segment over to the event organisers so that they can use it commercially.

Virtual Row – With a service like C2_2_Strava rows that are completed on a Concept2 rower can be uploaded to Strava and overlaid onto real world locations. For services such as Zwift Strava therefore has a Virtual Ride option but so virtual indoor rowing can be properly recorded it needs a ‘Virtual Row’ sport option.

Editing a Row changes it to ‘WaterSport’ on Strava.com, does not to it in iPhone app, but when you have saved an activity as row if you then edit it on Strava.com (web browser) it will try and save it as a ‘WaterSport’ unless you notice and again set it as ‘Rowing’.