Some Silly Strava Stats

As mentioned in my previous post, I recreated my Data Studio dashboard under a new Gmail account because Google’s G Suite legacy free edition, which became Google Workspace in 2020, will require a paid subscription this year. Three simple things needed to be done. First, I had to copy my Google sheet from the old account to my new account. Then, I had to create a new Zapier account, and share my zap from the old account with the new account. This was straightforward. Once logged into Zapier with my new account, I had to link the zap to my Strava account and also had to give the zap permission to modify my Google sheet. Pretty much the same procedure was necessary for the Data Studio report. I logged into the old account and shared the report with my new account. Then, I logged into the new account and had to replace the data sources to point to the Google sheet in my new Gmail account. Sounds complicated but was extremely simple.

I haven’t made any changes to my Data Studio dashboard since October of 2020. So, since I had to work with all of it, I played with the data some more, added chart cross-filtering to various pages, and created a new page filled with scatter charts. Strava is very fitness and competition-driven in the way it presents data. Power, speed, calories, energy, and heart rate to see how you did on a particular ride. There are challenges and segment leaderboards to see how you perform against others. In the data, there’s a ton of information Strava doesn’t present to you, though. The scatter charts on my new dashboard page answer a few silly things around speed. So without further ado, here are a few things all my Strava activities say about me as it relates to speed on the bike:

• My fastest year on Strava was 2010 for overall average speed.
• I dive-bombed like a Stuka in 2021.

• I cycle fastest in July, closely followed by September and June.
• The power to push the pedals hard evaporates in the heat of August.
• I can barely overtake a snowman in January.

• I generally haul ass on Wednesdays.
• I don’t know how to use my brakes on Mondays.
• Fine dinners and hearty breakfasts are boat anchors on weekends.

• My fastest bike is my stainless steel Ritte.
• My slowest bike is my 44 Snakedriver fat-bike.