National Bike Challenge 2015-Washington Area All-Stars

[cvcalhoun]

Don’t know what to do now that Freezing Saddles 2015 is over? Motivate yourself to exercise, and potentially win prizes, by participating in the National Bike Challenge May 1-September 30! You can sign up now so you’ll be ready when it starts. (If you signed up last year, you’re already in, and don’t need to sign up again.) Please don’t hesitate to join the team just because you’re not sure how many miles you will bicycle–EVERY mile helps!

To join:

1. Sign up at the National Bike Challenge registration page.

2. If you’re local to the Washington, DC area (two hours by bike from downtown), join the Washington Area All-Stars team! You can do this by going to the Washington Area All-Stars team page and clicking on “JOIN.” You can also join a school team and a workplace team if you like.

3. If you have a smartphone, you can use it to keep track of your miles automatically:
a. Sign up for Strava, MapMyFitness, Moves, or Endomondo.
b. Link the app to your National Bike Challenge account by signing in and going to Edit My Profile. At the bottom left of that page is a place where you can authorize the relevant app.
c. Put the app on your phone, and use it when riding.
d. Sign in to the National Bike Challenge site at least once a week, and on the last day of each month, and click on the “Log Miles” button, then click on “Sync Now” on the page that comes up.

4. If you have a Garmin, you can use it to keep track of your miles automatically:
a. Sign up for Strava. (You can also do this with MapMyFitness, but I’m keeping this simple by avoiding posting two sets of directions.)
b. While logged in to Strava, click on the red arrow in the upper right, then choose “Upload activity.” You will be given options to either upload from your Garmin or, if you already use the Garmin site to upload miles, to sync your Garmin and Strava accounts.
c. Sign in to the National Bike Challenge site at least once a week, and on the last day of each month, and click on the “Log Miles” button, then click on “Sync Now” on the page that comes up.

5. If you have neither a smartphone or a Garmin, you can still enter miles manually. Sign in to the National Bike Challenge site and click on the “Log Miles” button, then fill in the information under “MANUALLY LOGGED MILES” and click the “LOG MILES” button.

Topic

[dasgeh]

@Vicegrip 125376 wrote:

Has this been brought up to NBC? A big gap in Strava to NBC miles is troubling. It is more effort to not simply link and have one entry point for all your rides. In large groups of individuals the simplest methods often tend to self present. I have a hard time coming up with reasons for the miles in both not to be the functionally the same.

Cheating is poor form and can at best only produce a hollow victory. For someone to cheat on a open to all for fun contest such as this one is sad.

Just one explanation for a Strava v NBC delta: my husband races and uses Strava to track training and actually races. He doesn’t use it for transportation, so he (ok, I) enters those miles manually.

[DismalScientist]

@Mikey 125397 wrote:

I look at this like I look at my kid’s indoor soccer matches. The winner is rarely the one with the most points at the end, The scoreboard operator sometimes give the points to the wrong team. If life is about the journey not the destination, then our team is about the bonds we have made by being on the team together, not how many points our team had at the end.

Kid’s soccer?
You must not be from around here.:rolleyes:

[KLizotte]

I’ve always looked at NBC as less of a competition than as another way for public policy makers and advocates to promote cycling and show how many miles are possible by bike. It would be great if the Washington Post and other news outlets broadcast how many miles/trips we achieved in a few months. I think your average joe completely underestimates how much biking is going on in this area.

Lastly, the NBC encourages people to use GPS to track their rides which can only be helpful to planners on figuring out where to put bike infrastructure. Too bad the Cabi bikes don’t have tracking devices too for this reason (though I know the privacy folks would be up in arms about it).

[chris_s]

@KLizotte 125403 wrote:

Lastly, the NBC encourages people to use GPS to track their rides which can only be helpful to planners on figuring out where to put bike infrastructure. Too bad the Cabi bikes don’t have tracking devices too for this reason (though I know the privacy folks would be up in arms about it).

This is my favorite thing about the NBC – while still not perfect, it at least makes those Strava heatmaps somewhat more useful from a transportation planning perspective.

[DCLiz]

FWIW, I use Endomondo to sync my miles with NBC. I’m not sure that shows up in my profile, but every single mile in there came through Endomondo. I suspect a lot of people in NBC still do, since Strava wasn’t even an option until this year.

[CaseyKane50]

I use mileage from my Garmin and sync with Endomondo to NBC. I have found that Strave credits me with .5 to 2 miles more per ride depending on the length of the ride than my Garmin does.

[Anonymous]

They almost certainly cheated, in my opinion. There’s more questionable stuff than just strava mileage. Any one or two odd things could have an innocent explanation, or be some sort of coincidence, but there are about 5 or 6 very unusual or unlikely things about their suddenly added miles and riders. The only reason I say “almost” certainly is just because I can’t imagine why on earth they would cheat.

That said, I don’t think (my personal opinion) that we should try to do anything about it. I don’t know how NBC would police cheating other than to require GPS-only data (and even then, like cvcalhoun says, there are ways), but lots of casual or transportation cyclists don’t have any reason or desire to track miles with GPS. Excluding them would, I think, be contrary to the whole point of NBC– encourage cycling, have fun! Also, the top two teams sniping at each other over whether they’re cheaters or we’re sore losers kind of puts a negative spin on what should be just a fun, social game. Any one who wants to cheat, can cheat. It’s designed on the honor system. It’s up to Gainesville to look after their own honor. It’s only up to us to look after ours.

But just in case anyone has any gotten any bright ideas from this, no, the Substitution Czar will not be allowing any Freezing Saddles teams to add 25 imaginary ringers on March 19. I am not entirely sure what powers exist to stop it, but the title is Czar! Surely a Czar has some sort of power!:confused:

[consularrider]

@Amalitza 125429 wrote:

… But just in case anyone has any gotten any bright ideas from this, no, the Substitution Czar will not be allowing any Freezing Saddles teams to add 25 imaginary ringers on March 19. I am not entirely sure what powers exist to stop it, but the title is Czar! Surely a Czar has some sort of power!:confused:

Remember, the BAFS teams are set before the competition even begins so there is no way to arbitrarily add riders to your own team. There has been so much heartache the past two years about latecomers. We did have someone sneak into Rod’s team in 2014.

[dasgeh]

On the one hand, it’s a silly game and I’m not sure what NBC could even do to police Gainesville’s cheating.

On the other hand, the whole thing (including the accusations from the G-ville team leader about the use of the c….r word) has left a bad taste in my mouth, and made me less willing to go out of my way to do the NBC in the future.

[kwarkentien]

It’s not worth stressing out over this. Another explanation for the miles discrepancy is logging in using more than one service (Map My Ride and/or Endomondo). I had logged in with one of those early on when the Strava interface was acting up and it duplicated all my rides to that date. I dutifully entered negative mileage to correct that once I learned that happened. This could have happened either inadvertently or intentionally. But as I said, it’s really not important.

[PotomacCyclist]

@KLizotte 125403 wrote:

I’ve always looked at NBC as less of a competition than as another way for public policy makers and advocates to promote cycling and show how many miles are possible by bike. It would be great if the Washington Post and other news outlets broadcast how many miles/trips we achieved in a few months. I think your average joe completely underestimates how much biking is going on in this area.

Lastly, the NBC encourages people to use GPS to track their rides which can only be helpful to planners on figuring out where to put bike infrastructure. Too bad the Cabi bikes don’t have tracking devices too for this reason (though I know the privacy folks would be up in arms about it).

CaBi doesn’t have GPS tracking, but they do track trip starts/stops. The data is not as precise as GPS data, but it does show general trends on station/neighborhood usage.

[cvcalhoun]

@KLizotte 125403 wrote:

I’ve always looked at NBC as less of a competition than as another way for public policy makers and advocates to promote cycling and show how many miles are possible by bike. It would be great if the Washington Post and other news outlets broadcast how many miles/trips we achieved in a few months. I think your average joe completely underestimates how much biking is going on in this area.

Lastly, the NBC encourages people to use GPS to track their rides which can only be helpful to planners on figuring out where to put bike infrastructure. Too bad the Cabi bikes don’t have tracking devices too for this reason (though I know the privacy folks would be up in arms about it).

I would just point out that you can (and I do) use Garmin or Strava on a CaBi.

[LeprosyStudyGroup]

Now that the event is over:
assuming a rough parity in riders dropping off in logging miles (though who bothers? it’s automatic for most!)
whoever it is in the GCC is no longer bothering to input fake riders and miles, and we’re blowing them away by 3x the points
https://nationalbikechallenge.org/leaderboards/teams?date=2015-10

in unrelated news DC is the #2 “state” as well

[Steve O]

@LeprosyStudyGroup 127066 wrote:

we’re blowing them away by 3x the points

GCC September – 260,000 points
GCC October – 53,000 points

WAAS September – 235,000 points
WAAS October – 159,000 points

[DCLiz]

@LeprosyStudyGroup 127066 wrote:

(though who bothers? it’s automatic for most!)

I think it’s only automatic for Strava? I suspect DC edges out other communities/teams on Strava usage. Old-school NBC participants like me who are still using Endomondo still have to log in to get our miles to sync.

[Author]

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