Strava discriminates against heavy bikes

[peterw_diy]

I decided to populate the Gear data for my account and add my longtail family bike. What says Strava?

“The weight must be at most 50lbs”

Ha. My longtail is probably 60 pounds all on its own, and when I ride it I generally have another 30-100 pounds of gear and non-pedaling passengers loaded on it. But sure, Strava, if you can’t conceive of an, um, “athlete” riding a bike heavier than 50 pounds, I guess that’s what I’ll tell you. You’ll think I’m pathetic for my uphill speeds. But you know what, it’s your fault. Suck it, Strava.

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[peterw_diy]

OK, I have to give Strava some credit. It appears that power estimates are tied to activities and not your current body weight. Leave your profile body weight blank and you can use Strava.com to manually trigger calculation for a ride, using different weights for each ride.

[dasgeh]

BTW, Hope to see you on a Kidical Mass Arlington ride sometime! We have lots of fun types of bikes to ogle…

[peterw_diy]

@dasgeh 71787 wrote:

BTW, Hope to see you on a Kidical Mass Arlington ride sometime! We have lots of fun types of bikes to ogle…

Thanks! I definitely want to do that, most likely once it warms up a bit, since I’ll be coming up from Alexandria and don’t want to ask too much of my passengers. We got the longtail pretty recently (barely missed the Halloween kidical) and I want the kids to really love their early experiences on it. I know, this would be a piece of cake with a box bike that included a rain/wind tent…

[cvcalhoun]

I suppose I should be grateful that my bike is only about 64 lbs.–a hybrid bike, plus various accessories, plus panniers, plus whatever is in the panniers at the time. However, knowing that Strava thinks that no bicycle is more than 50 lbs. at least makes me feel a bit better about the fact that my average mph is only about 8. In my defense, many of my rides are up and down Wisconsin Avenue, and that two-mile uphill out of Georgetown definitely lowers my average speed!

[Author]

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