Am I addicted to Strava?

Last year I had, by all accounts, a pretty good season on the bike. I had the opportunity to check off some areas and trails that were on my wish list for a long time. I got to return to a few areas I hadn’t ridden in years. Best of all, I got to spend the rest of the time exploring the embarrassment of singletrack riches surrounding my new hometown. As I have for years, most of this riding was tracked and automatically uploaded to Strava with maybe a couple photos or a (hopefully) witty ride title.

But, at some point over the fall, I noticed I’d started spending more and more time on the app after a ride. Adding a photo turned into checking out the infinite feed of what other friends had ridden lately. Or getting a bit too deep into Strava’s very questionable “stats.” Was this still a fun, social app that added to the ride? Or was it starting to take away from the experiences I had on the bike?

As I scrolled through the activities of friends that I know have more free time, or local pros that have nothing but time, I started to feel worse about my own riding. And I wondered, why was I scrolling? Why couldn’t I stop scrolling?

Was I… addicted to Strava?

While I refuse to utter the words “Strava or it didn’t happen,” I still might have crossed a line with the app.

Fun vs fitness?

Strava should be fun. There’s literally no point to sharing your exercises with friends online than fun (the sites training metrics are shoddy, at best). But lately, it’s not feeling like much fun.

It might just be me. I have less time to ride than I used to. And I definitely have less time that a lot of the people I follow.

Or it could be the rapid expansion of frustrating “features.” Some features are just annoying, some seem counter productive, and some feel more like shaming than encouraging. (Maybe if there was an option to turn any of these off, it wouldn’t bug me so much.)

Strava’s features have always been a balance of helping performance and making sure users open the app more times and spend more time looking at it. But, lately, the balance seems skewed towards getting people to use the app more, not perform better. Fitness score – which requires an asterisk explaining that higher isn’t better, counter to every human impulse – seems particularly egregious, as it blindly rewards more time not better training. Then there was…