How Strava’s Fitness Score led me astray – Escape Collective

I roll into the driveway and slow to a stop. I’m sweating profusely, exhausted – I’ve only ridden for an hour or so, but I’ve ridden hard.

I save my ride in Strava’s iPhone app and wait impatiently for it to upload. I’m keen to see the progress I’ve made. I open the ride and scroll down. There it is: my “Fitness Score” has increased by two points. A small improvement, but a satisfying and validating one nonetheless.

The satisfaction is fleeting. Within just a couple of days, my two-point improvement has eroded and my Fitness Score is back to where it was. And then it keeps on sliding. A persistent cold turns a couple days off the bike into several weeks without riding. All the gains I’ve made in the weeks prior are swiftly erased, as if they never happened at all. 

Having this fitness data at my fingertips – and looking at it after each ride – is both a blessing and a curse.

***

My obsession started innocently enough. There I was just scrolling through my stats after a ride one day when I stumbled across the Fitness graph. Seeing that graph tilt upwards gave me a feeling of satisfaction I’ve been lacking in my cycling for a while now. I’ve been hooked since.

The pattern is the same. Finish a ride, immediately check my Fitness Score for any improvement. An increase feels great; a lack of improvement feels like the ride was almost pointless. I realise now that I’ve been relying on an almost-arbitrary metric to give meaning to my riding.

So what is Strava’s Fitness Score exactly? “While fitness is a complicated concept, it can be simplified to an accumulation of training,” a glossary page on the Strava website tells me. In essence, Strava uses heart-rate or power-meter data to calculate the training impulse of a given ride, then uses that and data from other rides to calculate your training load over time. If you’re familiar with Chronic Training Load (CTL) used by platforms like TrainingPeaks, Strava’s Fitness Score is much the same thing – a metric that reflects the intensity and consistency of your riding.

Sadly, “consistent” is not a word I could use to describe my riding in the past few years. Instead, my recent Fitness Score graph has resembled more of a jagged mountain range than the steady incline I’d much prefer to see.

Getting doored in November 2022 ended a promising run of fitness, and forced me off the bike for well over a month. In November 2023, a frustrating bout of chronic fatigue/post-viral fatigue left me unable to ride the way I wanted to for more than four months. More recently, a hip injury and a bout of illness has meant another few months of minimal riding.

It’s demoralising seeing that Fitness Score drop again and again. And even more so when I look back at my numbers from five, eight, 11 years ago, and realise I’ll likely never reach those same heights again.

And yet, for whatever reason, I can’t stop checking by Fitness Score after every ride.

Maybe I can’t stop looking because that silly score gives purpose to my riding when I can’t ride as much as I want to. I mightn’t have the time to do long rides in the hills like I once did, or even do short rides as often as I’d like. But with Strava’ Fitness Score, even a one-hour ride gives me the opportunity to see progress; to feel like I’m achieving something. Assuming I ride hard enough.

But it’s a fool’s game. As far as cycling metrics go, Strava’s Fitness Score is just not that instructive. It might give me a sense of how much I’ve been riding lately, and how hard, but it doesn’t tell me how strong I am. Not really. And besides, for that Fitness Score to keep increasing – for the graph to keep on heading upward – I’d need to be riding more often, likely for longer, and with ever-increasing intensity. That’s not realistic; believing otherwise is just setting myself up for failure.

Ultimately, there’s a bigger question I need to answer here. Rather than searching for meaning in a meaningless number – and fiendishly checking it after every ride – I need to work out what I actually want from my cycling. If I feel like a hard ride, maybe I should just aim for the highest normalised power I can on the day and ignore what the Fitness Score says about my cumulative training over recent weeks. Maybe I get back into more exploratory rides, using tools like Wandrer to motivate me to discover new roads? Perhaps I just need a proper fitness goal to work towards.

Or maybe I just need to be happy getting out on the bike when I can, riding for a while, and coming back with a clearer, happier head? Rather than getting hung up on numbers, perhaps I need to find satisfaction in simply being able to ride the way I want – something that hasn’t always been true these past couple years.

***

With my latest illness behind me and my hip feeling good, I head out for a cruisy hour on the bike. Nothing groundbreaking – just a simple out-and-back on the same bike track I ride all the time. But this time my mindset is different. I want to enjoy this one for what it is.

An hour later, I roll back into the driveway and slow to a stop. I save my ride in the Strava app then immediately turn off my phone. I have no idea whether my Fitness Score has changed, or by how much, and I’m resisting the urge to check. It’s a weird feeling not knowing; weird but freeing. 

I mightn’t have ridden hard and I’m not training for anything exactly, but that’s OK. The last hour has given me exactly what I needed – a bit of exercise, and a chance to clear my head. And I’m pleased to discover that that feels like enough. For the first time in a while, I don’t need numbers on a screen to tell me that the ride I did was worthwhile.

Did we do a good job with this story?

👍Yep
👎Nope

escapecollectiveFeelingspaywall