Meet the Explorers

The Explorer Max Square leaderboard has brought together a small but remarkably dedicated international community of riders taking in new roads and trails at every opportunity in order to increase their Explorer Max Square. What drives them to ride across frozen lakes, attempt to access military bases and buy opera tickets to tick off map squares? Let’s ask them!

Continue reading

Fly Through Your Strava Activities, Routes and Segments With Cesium “Earth” View

For a long time VeloViewer has had the option to export your activities as a KML file to then view in Google Earth but I always wanted to get the equivalent features embedded within the site. A recent discovery of the Cesium JavaScript library has made this possible and has opened the door to all kinds of interesting possibilities. Piloted recently on the Route Details page I’ve now rolled out this new “Earth” view to your activities and segments.

Continue reading

Déjà vu? Finding out if you’ve been there before

Activity OverlapsSegments are a great way to see how many times you’ve covered certain sections of road/track, but what if there are no segments set up for the stretch you are interested in? Say hello to the Activity Overlaps tab! OK, probably not the most sexy of names, but what it lacks in title it makes up for in functionality – select any section of any activity and it will search through all your activities and provide a list and map of any that overlap. Neat!

Continue reading

The Climbs of the Giro d’Italia – Stage 3

Giro 2014 stage 3Following stage 2’s scenic trip down coastline of Northern Ireland, stage 3 will take the peloton south from Armagh to the finish in the heart of Dublin. Similar to stage 2 this stage is one for the sprinters with only a couple of early climbs to allow an escape to get clear, scoop up the King Of the Mountain points, grab some TV time for their sponsors before being caught by the sprinters teams within sight of the finish. Although you’ll probably see little of these stage 3 climbs on the television coverage, you might fancy heading out to watch the race or to try them for yourself so here’s all you need to know.

Continue reading

The Climbs of the Giro d’Italia – Stage 2

2014 Giro d'Italia Stage 2 Map, Belfast to BelfastThe UK and Ireland are in for a real treat this year for cycling fans with the two most iconic races of the calendar hosting their first stages on our shores. The perhaps better known Tour de France is starting in Yorkshire this July (see the climbs of stage 1 and stage 2 parts one and two!) but the arguably more glamorous and exciting Grand Tour will be travelling around the beautiful countryside of Northern Ireland and down to Dublin.  The first stage is a 22km team time trial where each 9-man squad will attempt to make a choreographed blur of carbon and lycra through the streets of Belfast with the time being taken on the 5th rider across the line, but as always, it’s the hills which interest me the most as it is the key aspect of professional cycling that is open for all of us to easily try for ourselves on the roads used by the professionals themselves. Continue reading

Interactive Road Orientation Distributions – How Ordered is Your Town?

San Francisco Road Orientation DistributionsAn image created by Seth Kadish at Vizual Statistix caught my eye in my Twitter timeline yesterday showing road orientation distributions (i.e. what directions the roads go in) for a number of US cities.  Being British, the idea of roads forming a nice, thought-out pattern is completely alien to me and takes all the fun out of trying to get lost but the visualisations intrigued me none the less.  The calculations used by Seth had a few limitations as the length of each street didn’t influence the plot and a twisty street would only register in a single orientation rather than being split appropriately.  So time to step up to the plate to see if I can find a more interactive and representative way of doing the same thing.

Continue reading

Monthly Strava Activity Wheel

Monthly Activity WheelEver since I saw this visualisation of the 2013 Giro d’Italia route last year I’ve wanted to emulate that view, dynamically on my Strava data and luckily for you guys, let you use it too. Once I’d got my head around the maths for drawing the profiles on an arc then the rest quickly took shape. Isn’t maths fun!

Continue reading

Strava Bookmarklets – Map Flipper for Open Cycle/Street Map and Ordnance Survey

Map Flipper BookmarkletsFollowing on from my last post about my bookmarklet to view any Strava route, activity or segment in 3D, here is the follow-up post about a far more simple bookmarklet that will swap out the default Google Maps found in the Strava website for a choice of Open Cycle, Landscape and Street Maps or the Ordnance Survey maps in the UK.  At least here in the UK the Google Maps can be rather limiting from a cycling or running perspective due to a distinct lack of detail, particularly around off-road routes.  Fortunately the Open Maps (and even more so the Ordnance Survey maps) have detail in spades and with a bit of JavaScript magic we can swap out the Google Maps for the alternative map of our choosing.

Continue reading