Big Miles July Home Stretch and The Controversy of Strava

I hit the 1400 mile point today, making this my highest mileage month of all time. It's weird how day to day the fatigue feels differently. Some days are pretty rough, but then after a couple of easy days, you're ready for a big ride again. I'm thinking about taking it up to 1500 miles as there's still 2 days left. I guess I'll figure it out in the morning. This summer has been pretty hot so far. I guess it started out ok, but the last 3 weeks have been pretty brutal. It's not as bad as last summer, so I can't really complain too much.

The key, I think, to getting a lot of miles in July is being creative in the time you have available to ride. One way I've found is to start out really early in the morning. I guess you could ride indoors on the trainer, but I'm not interested in that right now. I'm getting a good amount of time in the hot part of the day. Mostly riding home from work. It seems pretty important to spend a few hours riding in the hot part of the day each week if you're going to be doing any racing in it. It makes such a huge difference when you're acclimated to the heat.

A ride I've been doing lately is the The OKC Early Risers Strava Challenge. We did the ride last Summer, but without the Strava part. Basically, It's a group ride that starts really early in the morning and has 3 Strava segments with prizes for the winners of each segment at the end of the month. Next month will be a different route with different segments. This month has definitely been a different group ride experience. It requires a totally different type of strategy to try and get the fastest time on a segment in a group setting. Especially when the group is pretty big. Some very interesting team tactics can be used I guess.

It's really been a fun and different way to do a more "competitive" type fast group ride. There seems to be 3 opinions regarding the whole Strava thing. Either folks love it, they think it's stupid, or they've heard about it, but don't really know what it is. I'm going to go ahead and say I think it's pretty cool. I've been on a few rides recently where some guys were obviously anti Strava. One guy said the whole thing was nothing more than a "dick flexing contest". We were talking about it at the shop, and in general, most spirited group rides are like this with guys trying to drop as many people as possible, attacking the group, getting to the top of any hill first, ETC.  So, due to the fact that it's really been going on since people have been racing bikes and doing unstructured training rides, we've been calling Strava  "digitally documented dick flexing".

It's basically all in fun. I think the DNA guys are really onto something by organizing this into a regular group ride.