Runtanstic, Strava and Co.

When I first started racing I didn't care how fast I was or how far I rode, but that changed very quickly!

After you as a newcomer feel the first physical training successes on your own body, you get the idea of ​​wanting to know whether you have also improved in terms of sport. The personal feeling of speed and length of the tour can be very deceptive. My decision was quickly made: One GPS Tracker must come. In the age of smartphones – and I am a mobile maniac for professional reasons – you can simply use your iPhone or Android smartphone to track the data. In addition, you can also use the smartphone as a bicycle navigation system (although I've never used it).

If you search the APP Store or Google Play, you get a crazy number of them Bike APPS offered, which one is the right one, you can only find out for yourself. I would like to share my personal experiences with you here.

To start with, I installed what is probably the best-known of all fitness apps: Runtasic. The app is almost self-explanatory, nicely structured and can be used immediately for various sports. Of course also for racing bikes. All activity trackers offer the One-Button Start & Stop functionality, so the recording can be started and stopped quickly. You don't have to worry about anything, at the end of the recording you have a very nice overview of the current and all past activities. If I had continued to ride alone forever, I probably would have stayed with Runtastic. But since riding in a group is much more fun and by-the-way even easier, I adapted to a colleague’s tracking app and switched to Strava.

Strava is the bike platform that I feel is used by most road cyclists. Strava offers a lot of functionality for more than one driver. Personally, I really like the segments at Strava. A segment is a section of track, i.e. a road or a specific path, on which all Strava riders compete against each other. There is also no driver who is first everywhere, every driver has his personal strengths and weaknesses and that is exactly what makes Strava segments so exciting. Another great feature is that you can follow multiple other drivers. Similar to Facebook, you get news from others, but only when they have driven. First of all, you motivate each other and you also get new impulses for new routes, because your own will sooner or later become boring. So Strava provides variety through the community.

Another TOP feature is Flyby. On the web under his account you can view the flybys for every tour, which means: you can see which Strava users drove past you on your ride, kind of cool! It is also very nice that the APP automatically recognizes who you drove with, based on the GPS data.

As you have already noticed, I can't get rid of Strava anymore. But what I am testing at the moment of this article is Cyclemeter. Cyclemeter does exactly what the name promises: The APP measures your data and displays it very easily, nothing more. That's a good thing, because as I said, Strava has already established itself as a community for many racing cyclists. However, Cyclemeter displays a lot while riding and manages splits of the tour. This means: You can evaluate each individual section - because you had to stop at a traffic light in between - and it is easier to recognize the stages afterwards.

Simple GPS trackers and bike computers are a dime a dozen. From €100 to €1.000. I would like to name a few here that I did not test, but rather my touring partner.

Benefits

Disadvantages

Benefits

As I said, I'm more of the smartphone type because you always have your mobile phone with you anyway. The problem is the battery life. Not so wild during training, but it can get tight on a bike tour.

Ride on!