The end of another year and once again, perhaps time to reflect on your cycling achievements for 2016. If you log your rides on Strava, there are a couple of fun ways to visualise your 2016 ride data.
Strava itself usually provides us with a personalised little video animation thing summarising your ride stats, and this year they’ve done it again.
Head over to https://2016.strava.com/ and sign in to see your own personalised video.
The Strava 2016 video is very creative, but I couldn’t help feeling that all those fancy 3D rendered visuals distracted me from the actual data that I was interested in. My data (the only aspect I’m really interested in, let’s be honest) seemed to be a bit lost at times in all the fancy animations.
I wanted something that’s going to help me to see the bigger picture regarding my 2016 ride data, and then lead me to think about what my goals for 2017 could be.
Maybe there’s a better way to make some sense of your annual cycling stats?
A better summary of your Strava 2016 stats, courtesy of Veloviewer.
For a more interesting analysis, and to produce something you may actually want to share with people (or even print out, perhaps??), try the Veloviewer annual summary tool. It packs in a lot more information and certainly feels more focused on your data.
There’s a lot to reflect on in that little chart, and it also includes things like your Eddington number, which is the greatest number of days that you’ve ridden that distance. For example, if you’ve ridden 40 miles on 40 separate occasions, your Eddington number will be 40. This itself could provide some useful motivation for your 2017 cycling goals.
What does your 2016 ride summary tell you?
Mine says I didn’t do as much riding in 2016 as I did in the previous few years, nor did I do any particularly long rides (my longest was only 58 miles!).
Reflecting back, I think this is mainly down to time pressures and a shift towards trying to achieve more of a balance between various commitments. This has mostly translated into not wanting to appear selfish by disappearing for 5 hours on a Sunday, so my club riding all but vanished in 2016.
Maintaining good fitness for the sake of my overall wellbeing became more important to me in 2016, than simply being the fittest cyclist I could be.
Having said all that, I did miss club activities and would like to do more, from a social perspective.
In the corporate world, I hear a lot of talk about “work/life balance”. It’s what people talk about when they pretend that they’re not overdoing it. It’s a nice concept and worth striving to maintain a good, healthy balance. Failure to do so results in stress and ill health, eventually.
I guess I’ve been looking for the best “bike/life balance”, and my quest continues in 2017…