Velo Flow is a great way to visualise your rides but it really comes into its own when used to view group rides, be they club runs, sportives or races. Watch as you try and drop your club mates on a climb or get left behind with a mechanical before meeting back up at the cafe stop.
Whichever the type of ride, the steps to go through to get the best Velo Flow of your ride are the same and very easy.
For a long time the main missing element on VeloViewer has been a ride details page. Well, not any more. Very much a version 1 so expect lots of changes based on some things I still want to add and any feedback/requests you guys want to give me. For now though, view each of your rides’ stats, interactive map, elevation charts (including the gradient histogram – distance travelled at each gradient) and lists of all segments covered (on a secondary tab).
UPDATE – Due to changes in the Strava API increasing user’s data privacy VeloFlow is no longer able to run.
After coming across a great visualisation last week that animated GPS traces of staff commuting to Loughborough University I was inspired to try something similar with Strava rides and I’m very pleased with the result.
I’m currently multi-tasking my late night baby feeding with reading “My Time” by Bradley Wiggins and was interested to read the following:
“The data we had been working on for road racing in 2012 was not power output or speed, but VAM. The average VAM for a big climb on the Tour in 2010 was 1,530-1,600: 1,530 on Plateau de Beille, 1600 on l’Alpe d’Huez.”
By far the most hits I get on VeloViewer are from the many on-line forums out there and primarily from the signature images that people like to use. Every forum seems to be different of what is and isn’t acceptable in terms of signature images so I’ve done my best to accommodate all the variations that people might want to use, it is down to you though to use an acceptable configuration for your forums. The latest version of the signature image addresses a number of issues raised by these users.
Your leaderboard positions on Strava segments can be a bit of a badge of honour but the significance of each of those positions can vary wildly. If you are 6th placed out of 3000 riders then that is pretty good going but 1st place out of just 2 riders is less so. In steps an suggestion from a forum to include a position percentile column and corresponding graphs, a few minutes later and the first incarnation of the position percentile appeared.
Your stats in VeloViewer are only as good as the data that is passed in from Strava, and around 1.5% (based on sample data I had a couple of months ago) of Strava segments seem to have bad data associated with them. The 2 main culprits are dodgy elevation data and non-matching distance data.
This isn’t entirely Strava’s fault although I believe there are ways that they could clear up the majority of these things automatically. But for the time being it is up to us, the Strava community, to tidy it up the best we can which will also result in much more accurate stats in VeloViewer.
Have you ever wondered what the VAM and Relative Power values are on VeloViewer ? Basically these provide you with a good set of values with which you can compare your efforts between different Strava Segments (as long as they are categorised climbs).
Due to almost unexpected popularity of the VeloViewer site, the complexity of it’s content and the constant trickle feed of new features I thought I would set up a more formal place to document what is going on and how things work so you can make best use of what’s already there and discover the new stuff.
I’ll try and work through the various areas of the VeloViewer site and explain what everything means. Check out the categories list on the right for a (hopefully) more structured view of the posts.
Post a comment if there is anything specific you want me to cover off sooner rather than later.