Strava users know all about tracking their mileage totals, but did you know you can track mileage on individual components? How many miles have you done on those tyres since you put them on? What about that chain, or the cassette?
If you’ve been riding a while, you’ll have certainly changed tyres more than a few times, and probably had to replace bits of the drive train from time to time – worn out cassettes, stretched chains. Maybe you like to run lightweight wheels in the summer and heavier duty ones for winter. Given that we spend good money on new bits, and their lifespan isn’t infinite, it’s useful to track the mileage of separate parts.
- How many miles has it been since you last changed your chain?
- How many miles did you get out of those tyres before they started picking up punctures?
This can be useful to know, in terms of planning an upgrade/maintainance schedule, or just for reflection, to influence future purchases.
How to set up tracking the mileage of your components in Strava?
It’s really easy, you just gotta poke around in the profile section and find the part called “My Gear”.
In that section you can add details of all your bikes, because like guitars, we all know you can never have too many!
This screen is also useful for selecting the “default” bike, so that when you upload ride data from a garmin, for example, it will automatically assume you used that particular bike, though you’re free to change it from the drop down list.
Clicking into each bike separately, you’ll notice that it’s possible to add components. Specify the item via the drop down lists and free text boxes and then add the date the part was added. That’s all there is to it.
You can apply this retrospectively too, as long as you know the dates. For example, my summer bike had a new bottom bracket last September. By adding that data I can now see how many miles it’s done, and anticipate when I’m likely to need to replace it again.
Using this method you can keep an eye on your vital bits of kit, individually.
Great information thanks again, Keep up the good work
Thanks for pointing this out, just what I’ve been looking for..
Is there a way I can add my bike to the previous rides I have completed? I’ve done 10 rides, but only just realised I can add my Bike/
Yes, you can go into each ride individually and ‘edit’. I don’t think it’s possible to batch process them in any way, so it could be a tedious process depending on how many rides you need to edit.
Cheers Alan, slightly tedious, only 10 rides to do though
How do you deal with the summer/winter wheels thing? if you “retire” something, there doesn’t seem to be a way to get it back… They should have a “substitutes bench” so you can list multiple bits of the same kit and then chose which ones are “active” or “inactive”?
I was out for a ride this morning and began to wonder how many kilometers I had done on my current chain. Got home found Strava was offline then found your website by chance, very good topic you covered as soon as Strava’s back online I’ll be keying in my component details with approximate values. Happy riding!
It’s very useful. The only downside is that it’s difficult to track things like wheels if you regular switch between different wheelsets, as you can only “retire” items to end their use. To get around this, what I do is re-create the item using the retired mileage in the description name. So for example, it might end up being listed as “Carbon wheel 1800”, so then I know I need to add 1800 to whatever mileage Strava says I’ve done on it since.
Thanks, I’m now using it to monitor brake pad and tyre consumption
Great stuff. Thanks for this.
Great thread – I also was wondering how long my components last. The component tracker in Strava is a start but it doesn’t go deep (can’t install/remove a component multiple times, move it between bikes, only one retired component of a type is shown, etc.). I am using http://www.quantifymybike.com. It integrates with Strava and provides much more detail, and comes for free. I was amazed how predicable my tire intervals were (when using the same tire type and looking at distance), or MTB brake pad intervals (when looking at elevation gain), and how different the mileage on chains of different brands was (same price category, same riding style, same maintenance).