Recently I was alerted (by a work colleague) to an excellent online workout tracking site: Strava (www.strava.com). You may well be thinking – as I did at first – that it will be yet another site like all the others. At first glance that is indeed the case. Upload GPS file, check speed/elevation/heart rate graphs etc. Boring. 

But you’d be wrong. 

Strava has one unique selling point (well not quite unique) – ‘segments’. Once you have uploaded a ride you can assign a section of the ride to be a segment. As soon as you have done this, anyone who uploads a GPS file that covers that segment will have their time extracted automatically and added to a leader board. Every local hill climb, TT course and short sprint can now become an online competition! Excellent! 

The best thing is you don’t have to do anything to time yourself on the segments, just ride them whilst logging GPS and Strava will do the rest. There are even apps for iPhone and Android. Even better is that people have already defined hundreds of these segments, many of which can be tackled simply whilst commuting to work (although I *may* have resorted to an aero helmet this weekend..!). 

Now comes the problem – how do you use this with WP7 phones where there is no Strava app? Thankfully this is simple. All you need is the “GPS & GPX Logger” app from the WP7 marketplace. Start the app recording when you go for a ride (don’t forget to enable background operation in the settings), and afterwards you can upload the GPX file to Dropbox. Then it’s simply a case of uploading the GPX file to Strava. 

Enjoy!