About

VeloViewer provides new insights, engaging visualisations, motivational goals and in-depth analysis to your Strava data. Simply connect to Strava to bring in your free data and try out all of the features VeloViewer has to offer and use some of the same tools that have helped win 100’s of WorldTour races including 4 Tours de France, 3 Vueltas a España and 2 Giro d’Italia. It is currently being used by 17 men’s WorldTour teams and 6 top women’s teams and numerous national federations. Upgrade to PRO from just £10 per year to use VeloViewer on your entire Strava history.

What is VeloViewer

VeloViewer connects to your Strava account and pulls across your activities, segments and routes to provide you with a whole new world of dashboards, charts, 3D graphics, filterable lists, leaderboards, motivational goals along with your up-to-date leaderboard positions on all of the segments you have covered.

For free you can use all of VeloViewer’s features on a one-off set of your data (25 activities, 250 segments and 10 routes). This should give you a perfect feel for all the features and let you decide whether it is worth upgrading to PRO (£10 per year) or PRO+ (£20 per year) to use the site on your entire Strava history and your future activities. Info on Free vs PRO vs PRO+ here.

There is no need for you to be a Strava Summit (previous known as Premium) user to use VeloViewer. Everything will work just fine if you are a free Strava user. If you do have the Summit Analysis Pack then you will be able to view heart rate and power zone data for all of your Activities in VeloViewer as well.

Summary

Your Summary page provides top level views of your data spanning across all of the years that you’ve been logging your activities to Strava. Easily compare your progress on any metric (e.g. distance, time, elevation, calories etc) between days, months or years. Numerous Eddington numbers for the hard-code data geeks and get involved with Explorer Tile ticking for something a bit different that’ll get you visiting new roads, trails and places.
View your best achievements along with your VeloViewer Score with which you can compare yourself to others from a performance perspective.

List pages (Activities, Segments, Efforts & Routes)

Fully filterable, sortable lists of all of your activities, segments, efforts (attempts at segments) and routes. You want to know the total distance you have ridden below 10 degrees on a MTB on a Tuesday (or any other combination of filters)? Easy, head to your Activities page and set the filters then view the results on maps or in fully configurable charts.

Want to know how many top 20 places you have on 3rd category climbs? Head to your Segments page and filter away.

Other athlete specific pages (Challenges, Wheel, Infographic, Signature Image)

  • Challenges – view your progress on all Strava challenges whether you’ve joined them or not.
  • Wheel – An interactive Giro’esque view of your activities.
  • Infographic – A summary of your year in an easily printable, sharable view.
  • Signature Image – Provides an auto-updating graphic to be used in your internet forum signature.

Leaderboards

Yearly and all-time leaderboards and distributions for key metrics (distance, elevation, time, Eddington, Explorer and more) for your rides, runs and/or swims. View for all VeloViewer users or filter by just those in your Strava clubs.

Segment based leaderboard for all of Simon Warren’s 100 Climbs books for the UK and Europe. Tick more climbs or improve your times to move your way up the leaderboards for each of Simon’s books and chapters.

Activity, Segment & Route details pages

Dive into maps, 3D/2D elevation profiles and all the data recorded for your activities, segments and routes. Use the same tools used by the professional WorldTour cycling teams for their race strategy preparations and team presentations.

One of my VeloViewer users has put together a much more in-depth guide to VeloViewer which is available here.

Professional WorldTour teams use of VeloViewer

Many of the top level, WorldTour professional cycling teams have been using VeloViewer’s 3D and 2D route and segment graphics in their race preparation and rider briefings for many years and in 2016 I teamed up with Team Sky to provide a dedicated “Race Hub” to provide a single location for their entire season’s races. Read Cycling Weekly’s article on the profesional team part of VeloViewer here.

The core element to the Race Hub is the same Route Details page that you can use yourself to view your own Strava routes except the pro teams have some key extra features that are of great value to the teams but of less importance to use mere mortals!

In 2017 GreenEdge (i.e. Orica/Mitchelton Scott) also came onboard alongside Team Sky and I built them a dedicated app to sit in the team cars to provide the DS’s and coaches all the info they needed about the route during the race.  Currently I have 11 men’s WorldTour teams and 5 top level women’s teams signed up to my Race Recon package.

//www.facebook.com/VeloViewer/videos/1223293847776708/

Video taken from Eurosport. If you watch the GreenEdge videos then you’ll often spot VeloViewer being used in the rider briefings and in the car.

The History of VeloViewer

Ben Lowe
Ben Lowe (not in Sunny Sheffield)

VeloViewer has been entirely built and maintained by my (Ben Lowe’s) fair hands from VeloViewer Towers in the attic of the family home in the sunny Yorkshire city of Sheffield, UK.

It all began back in 2012 when my wife was pregnant with our second child and was heading to bed at 8pm each evening. Having that spare time coupled with a desire to refresh my web skills (after 20 years working on desktop application design/development) I needed a project to get stuck into. A cycling friend had just introduced me to Strava and I discovered their API so set about creating a webpage that would show a list of all of your segments with their current leaderboard placings. In its very beta state I pointed a few of my cycling club mates at it and before long the word had spread across various cycling forums and VeloViewer as we know it today was properly born. The features of the site then steadily evolved with lots of ideas shared by users but ultimately I would build features that I actually wanted to use myself.

After a couple of years of providing free access to the site, the running costs, coupled with the amount of time I needed to spend supporting the site, meant a decision had to be made: either start charging people to use the site or switch it off. Fortunately I chose the former which then led to a very stressful 12 months when I was still doing my day-job and working every other hour possible on VeloViewer. In February 2016 the time had come to take the plunge and quit the day-job and focus 100% of my time on VeloViewer and I’ve never looked back!

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