Freezing Saddles 2014 Discussion Draft

[rcannon100]

Freezing Saddles 2014 Discussion Draft – okay, we learned a lot last year.

Freezing Saddles is a community driven event generated by the good folk of the BA Bike Forum. It is not run or sponsored by any org. It is the product of many good people doing many good things. It is the ultimate in crowd sourced cycling!

Since this is a crowd sourced game, its time for the crowd to pontificate on how the game will be played. The goal is to come to consensus on this years version.

Lessons learned from last year

* Everyone who signs up must be reachable (dont assume they are watching the forum). I avoided collecting email addresses last year cause I did not want to handle PII. We had a number of people sign up but then never participate. Recommendation: This year we need some way to reach people. If we are able to use STRAVA this year, then everyone who signs up must (a) be a forum member and (b) be on STRAVA.

* This was really a community event of the forum. What made it fun was the banter in the cold of winter as we slogged our way through that 3 feet of snow last year. Recommendation: focus FS on the forum. Dont market it outside the forum. Assume participants are member participants.

* This is a crowd sourced game. We need lots of volunteers to handle all the different aspects of the game.

* This is a crowd sourced game run by volunteers. Please dont make the life of the volunteers more difficult.

* Late sign ups did not really work. The end result was the creation of an 11th team that never really got off the ground. We can just assign late sign ups to an N+1 team if we want – but I have no expectation that that team will be able to compete.

* Last year the handicap was based on November and December riding statistics (how much did you ride on average per week during November and December?). That actually seemed like it worked pretty well. What should this years handicap be based on? September perhaps for those who participated in the Natl Bike Challenge??

* Any other revisions??

Below is from last year:

Freezing Saddles: Winter Bike Challenge
Never Give an ELITE Cyclist an Even Break

NOTE: Excluded activities: If you post an activity to Strava during the competition period which is not an outdoor bike ride, then it should have the string “#NoBAFS” in the activity name.

Freezing Saddles! The Epic Adventure of a band of ELITE Cyclists, facing the challenges of the wild wild wild bike paths. Confronting the darkest of evenings, the coldest of mornings, and the stupidest of Ninjas – these brave cyclists challenge each other because, if they didnt, they might have to actually do some work during the day.

The saga runs January 1 until the last day of Winter, March 20. It will conclude with a March Madness Playoff that someone will probably design. There will be a Happy Hour at the end with many pointless trophies.

Tribes (teams):

• Composed of ~5 riders or less
• For riders from the #bikedc, Washington DC Bike Forum general community (Washington DC greater metropolitan area)
• Volunteer Captains (captains will address any data problems, negotiate or cause confusion, and provide motivational seminars);
• This is a ten-gallon hat tournament. Riders will be randomly assigned to tribes based on self declared average weekly mileage and days cycled. Tribes will be created so that each tribes’s average weekly point score is roughly equal to everyone else’s. To achieve this, tribes may be composed of differing numbers of riders.
• No late sign ups.
• Interested cyclists must sign up by December 25 Midnight – Tribes will be announced within a couple days.

Scoring: Riders will receive 10 points for each day and 1 point for each mile ridden. Minimum ride is 1 mile. The tribe’s score will be the sum of the tribe members (indoor trainers do not count- you must be freezing in the saddle outside).

Backend: STRAVA (please sign up for an account, and join the “Bike Arlington” club on STRAVA – you should be able to enter data manually or automatically. Additional information will be posted here on the forum.)

This is a self organized group activity based on consensus. No one is in charge or running this thing. Participation is voluntary and entirely at your own risk.

Be Brave. Be Bold. Be…. questful! In the words of Hedley Lamarr:

Men, you are about to embark on a great crusade to stamp out runaway decency on the bike paths. Now you men will only be risking your lives, whilst I will be risking an almost certain Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Topic

[vvill]

Strava does allow users to export ride data as GPX (one at a time, unless you’re a Premium Member), but then we still need a method to derive timing, mileage, elevation, etc. from those. And you wouldn’t be able to poll data.

If we have a good idea of which one of the other APIs we can use then maybe we can do a trial run with a few users and see if it’ll suit our needs. Does tapiriik sync elevation data too?

I guess we won’t be able to easily do a Segment counter though (e.g. Hains Pt laps) without a Strava API. We’d have to roll our own which would involve a bit of work.

[hozn]

Yeah, I think that the run RunKeeper API looks pretty solid. Looks like it includes some basic geo (lat/lon for start/end), as well as distance, elevation, etc. (http://developer.runkeeper.com/healthgraph/example-api-calls#example-get-individual-activity)

The Garmin Connect API is not bad either, looks like it has a little more data (at least for Garmin devices?). Not quite as easy to work with. Not certain of the security/authorization (RunKeeper seems to have a good strategy there using OAuth, might be more work to get the comeptition website officially registered with them, though). Also not 100% sure, but am fairly confident that non-Garmin owners can use Garmin Connect too (either manually uploading GPX files or using a service like tapiriik.

From what I can find, Endomondo does not have a public API. They have an API they have released to a few “select partners” and they have a mobile API that other services use for intergration, but it is apparently limited. Shucks!

Unfortunately, RideWithGPS doesn’t appear to have any public developer API either — and no support for tapiriik syncing, so probably a non-starter anyway.

From initial survey RunKeeper and Garmin Connect seem to be the best options. Neither is going to support the competition framework directly, but they both seem to provide a good place to publish data, which can then be pulled together by another app. Probably advantage to RunKeeper since it also has a mobile app that can record the data (in fact, the website is pretty limited) in case people want to publish directly there and not both with any syncing system.

At the end of the day, if I were participating I would want to not change my workflow at all. For those that choose to publish to Garmin Connect or Strava (or Endomondo!?) this is easy to do with tapiriik (costs $2/year to have it done automatically).

As noted, manual rides won’t get sync’d so if anyone is logging manually, they’ll have to do it on the storage backend website / using the app (e.g. RunKeeper). If I were running the competition (but I’m not!) I would exclude manually-entered activities since it makes those rides only count toward a points category, and thereby limiting the ability to introduce official alternative prize categories — without severely handicapping teams with riders entering data manually. (Strava does not count manual activities for any of its competitions either.)

[hozn]

@vvill 68926 wrote:

If we have a good idea of which one of the other APIs we can use then maybe we can do a trial run with a few users and see if it’ll suit our needs. Does tapiriik sync elevation data too?

I guess we won’t be able to easily do a Segment counter though (e.g. Hains Pt laps) without a Strava API. We’d have to roll our own which would involve a bit of work.

Yeah, I believe tapiriik just grabs the GPX (or TCX, if available) and so it will sync elevation data and anything else that was recorded (heart rate, cadence, etc.). Of course the GPX that Strava provides may differ from the one that the device uploaded (if applicable), which means that there could be differences in things like elevation if people are recording via Strava app vs. recording via Garmin and syncing directly from Connect -> (e.g) RunKeeper. As attractive as it is, elevation is probably one to avoid turning into an official prize due to the variation. (My most recent test of this in deciding finally whether I was going to do the elvation challenge: Garmin 1650 ft, Strava: 1100 feet. So unless it is enforced that all data must pass through Strava, that probably gives disadvantage to smartphone users.)

Segment counter would not be very easy. Assuming that we can extract the GPX from the backend (can with Garmin Connect, but maybe not? with RunKeeper), we’d need to come up with a matching algorithm on lat/lon locations — need to have tolerance due to inaccuracy/imprecision of GPS devices. There are obviously great libraries to do this, but it increases the server requirements (shared hosting is tougher when you need custom-compiled software, especially if you want it built into the database layer). Matching a single point on a segment might be doable, but a full segment (like a lap of HP) would certainly be much more work. I would say that segment matching is probably not an option for 2014, unless we screen scrape Strava (or use their unpublished rest+json APIs that the web frontend uses).

[DismalScientist]

@hozn 68939 wrote:

As noted, manual rides won’t get sync’d so if anyone is logging manually, they’ll have to do it on the storage backend website / using the app (e.g. RunKeeper). If I were running the competition (but I’m not!) I would exclude manually-entered activities since it makes those rides only count toward a points category, and thereby limiting the ability to introduce official alternative prize categories — without severely handicapping teams with riders entering data manually. (Strava does not count manual activities for any of its competitions either.)

My manual entries we all for obvious GPS tracking errors and dead phone batteries. I don’t see why manual activities should be excluded from the overall competition, but it’s OK to exclude them from the alternative prize calculations.

[hozn]

@DismalScientist 68954 wrote:

My manual entries we all for obvious GPS tracking errors and dead phone batteries. I don’t see why manual activities should be excluded from the overall competition, but it’s OK to exclude them from the alternative prize calculations.

Yeah, I realize that there are one-off cases. I guess my suggestion was that a requirement of the competition could be “must have GPS ride recording device” (i.e. smartphone, gps computer, etc.), since people that would only enter manually would put their team at a disadvantage for any non-mileage-based-points awards. That is assuming that such awards were made part of planned competition (announced from beginning).

[Mikey]

As a manual ride recorder last year (I was smartphone less becuase of archaic DoD phone rules) and finally got strava during the NBC. I can say that recording miles on my smart phone is not fool proof. My cell phone battery life is not good enough to record more than 3 hours of riding (not as ridiculous as it sounds when you consider I live in Fairfax and commute to the District), and often time my Strava would be jacked up and would not record my results. There needs to be a manual entry capability for the challenge. It’s okay if manual entry doesn’t allow for specific pointless prizes but for the big challenge there needs to be a way to make it work for the technologically but not pedally challenged.

[vvill]

Not sure if this would make ridewithgps an option, it’s a 3 year old post:
“We don’t have a complete JSON API yet, but much of our stuff is available via JSON. Send me an email, and let me know what you need, and I’ll make it happen.”
ridewithgps does have segments too.

ridewithgps also gives you the best option to make a manual entry (you can manually map your route to log it), so you could even get an elevation estimate.

[hozn]

@vvill 69022 wrote:

Not sure if this would make ridewithgps an option, it’s a 3 year old post:
“We don’t have a complete JSON API yet, but much of our stuff is available via JSON. Send me an email, and let me know what you need, and I’ll make it happen.”
ridewithgps does have segments too.

ridewithgps also gives you the best option to make a manual entry (you can manually map your route to log it), so you could even get an elevation estimate.

Yeah, I saw that thread. I didn’t go further to inquire, figuring that the touchy-areas of data access (like authentication/authorization) would be rudimentary if they haven’t planned this out. (E.g. with RunKeeper people would have to grant access to the application, which would then allow us to read activities without needing their account passwords.) It is probably worth an email, though, as I love the idea of supporting ridewithgps.

[eminva]

I’m not a technical expert and I don’t even know what “API” stands for, but if I’m on the Strava marketing team, I’d be reading this thread with increasing alarm. They either need to make the “API” available, figure out how to facilitate Freezing Saddles-type events inhouse or lose the franchise to a competitor or upstart.

Liz

[vvill]

I think Strava already decided that they are the big fish with their last round of changes and ignoring many (actually, all but a few) developers. DC Rainmaker has a good write-up.

@hozn 69023 wrote:

Yeah, I saw that thread. I didn’t go further to inquire, figuring that the touchy-areas of data access (like authentication/authorization) would be rudimentary if they haven’t planned this out. (E.g. with RunKeeper people would have to grant access to the application, which would then allow us to read activities without needing their account passwords.) It is probably worth an email, though, as I love the idea of supporting ridewithgps.

Are you volunteering?

Yeah I’d rather support ridewithgps since it seems to be run by just a people of guys (who ride, and code). I think a few people only signed up with Strava so they could participate in this challenge last year, so hopefully it wouldn’t be too big a deal for people to get an new ridewithgps account if it works out.

[hozn]

@vvill 69025 wrote:

Are you volunteering?

Yeah, I’ll contact them.

[GB]

Would requests from multiple people to Strava help or hurt our cause?

[PeteD]

If Strava’s locked up their API, I’m curious how veloviewer.com is still able to get full information.

–Pete

[vvill]

I can’t imagine it would hurt. Reading the “comments” section on the DC Rainmaker thread, it seems that in around August, Strava changed their mind on some of the API access for third-party apps and started talking more to developers.

@PeteD 69028 wrote:

If Strava’s locked up their API, I’m curious how veloviewer.com is still able to get full information.

–Pete

They’re one of the few original apps who got API v3 access.

[Mikey]

Do we want to start a new thread to get an idea of the people who would be participating? Do we want to resurrect the March Madness tournament idea. Each Team competing head to head for a week seeded by their cumulative score during the contest. Winner take all? (all of what I don’t know).

[Author]

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