Strava Activities

As someone who is passionate about exercise, I sometimes log my runs, rides, or tours. These communities often emphasis speed or distance over breadth and experience.

I began thinking, instead of focusing on the stats of a single activity, we could focus on the total footprint of all an individuals activities as a performance metric. The literal and figurative 'extent' of activities they have done.

This can be a metric that shifts motivations away from traditional performance, and more towards consistency, curiosity, and exploration. Each ride isn't just a workout, it's an addition to your personal atlas.

Map

This map shows every actvity I've ever recorded on strava. It's a neat way to show how much of an area I've explored! Makes me realize I haven't done much in the Lone Peak Wilderness. Time to change that.

How could this metric be calculated?

• Unique distance score — rewards all new (non-repeated) miles. The issue here is that you could rack up a pretty decent score from riding all the trails at a chair lifted bike park.
• Tile based score — This method grows a users score based on the number of tiles that the user has entered. It decreases the influence of high density areas like bike parks, preventing the same area or "tile" from being counted twice.

The Map

The map above was built with MapBox GL JS. I downloaded all of my recorded activities from strava, unzipped and parsed the GPX files in Python, and combined them into a single GeoJSON layer.