Update 5 June 2012 - Strava Targets

I went out again this morning to try to get a quick ride in before it rained, and also to get another ride as I can't see me being able to cycle to work in the coming week due to weather and work commitments.

I was aiming for a relatively short ride but wanted to try to get some Strava segments in. I thought I'd give Vicarage Hill in Tanworth a go and went for it. However about 3/4 of the way up my HR was at the max and I knew it was a non-time. What's worse is I was blown for the next 10 miles or so all the way down to Liveridge Crossroads, through Henley in Arden and up to the road down to Lowsonford. I had decided after Vicarage hill that the only segment worth having a go on was the Lowsonford to Lapworth segment and was cruising up to that point. 

For this climb I actually felt OK and could push hard from the word go and got into the Big ring right after the short first climb which starts at the disused railway bridge. I pushed in the big ring to the little kick about 1/2 way up, dropped back onto the little ring and then shifted up for the rest of the segment to top the by the water tower, just about holding 20mph once over the motorway. There was a tail wind and I felt OK all the way up so was hoping for an improvement over the time of the day before.

When I got home I was ecstatic to see that I had made further performance gains even over the attempt on 2 June, and improved from 7:03 to 6:35. That meant that in the space of 3 days I had improved by 51 seconds and moved from ~18th all the way up to 5th. And I had jumped Dave Brown's time as well!

The data for my PR on this segment is here:

You can see the first small climb between 30-75 seconds and the 2nd little kick (that I hate) around 3:30. My heart rate was at about 150bpm at the bottom and rose steadily to a steady 170bpm at the top. And it confirms me averaging +20mph for the last minute or so.

From this I was thinking during the day about what Strava has encouraged me to do. Basically I can't go out now without thinking about where I might be able to get faster and who I can beat. This has without doubt made an improvement in my average speeds - however you can go out and feel quick but post a disappointing time or go out and think it was nothing special but get a good time. This was one of those times. For example another example of this was when I got the KOM for the Henley-in-Arden to Claverdon - A4189 segment on April 21 2012 - 9:57 and yet I had felt awful along the whole 2.9miles. In fact I have never got anywhere near that time since - the closest being 11:10 - a whole 75 secs slower. Sometimes it just happens like that - a beautiful convergence of weather, road conditions, HR, breathing and general "wellness" that if you could bottle would make you a multi-billionaire.

Despite these one-off rides I do believe that I am generally getting fitter and faster so I took all my ride data from Strava for the Lowsonford segment and spent an hour or so fiddling around with the data in Excel to plot various permutations.

Here is a graph of average speed over the segment in ascending date order:

The linear best fit line does show a ~2mph improvement over the past 18 moths or so. There is also quite a lot of variation - +/-1 mph around an average of 15.4mph, and the R2 for this data is poor so not too much should be read into this, however the long term improvement is reasonably clear I think.

I have looked at doing this before and for some other comparable rides (like my commute to work) any improvement is less clear.

What makes this a non-trivial task is the only way I can see to produce these graphs is to copy the data from the tables in Strava and then paste into Excel. However there is then a load more work, as you can only get 25 rides at a time, and then there is quite a bit of work to convert the data from various text formats to e.g. proper date values, strip the "mph" text from the speed values etc. I got further this time so with some more effort might be able to make it a bit easier.

Don't hold your breath waiting though. I'll use Google to see if someone has already done something