December is fast approaching and Strava has once again dug into their activity numbers to see what trends pop out for cyclists, runners, and other active athletes. What stands out among the 36 million athletes over 195 countries might be 3.6 billion kudos, more cyclists out riding further together, or what Strava calls the Year of the QOM with even bigger efforts by women via their social sports platform.
2018 Strava Year in Sport, a look back at the data collected
There is plenty of other interesting finds in the data crunching. Out of all the rides recorded, the most popular cycling segment in the world with at least 500’/150m appears to be Box Hill in Dorking in the UK with 492,520 attempts. The top ride in the US alone isn’t far behind – the Central Park Loop in NY, NY tallied up 425,262 attempts.
If you join a Strava club, on average you end up recording more than three times as many activities as those not in clubs. I guess that reinforces that peer pressure and camaraderie can be good motivators to stay active.
Looking across activities, it seems that cyclists who ride a lone tend to spend more time on the bike. But the benefits of the pack are pretty apparent – group rides averaged more than 70% greater distances. Also, it looks like we are more active across all sports – 1.2% longer time spent and 21.4% more distance covered than last year.
Also it looks like snowshoers are kicking our butts in at least one category. A third of all snowshoe activities share photos, while less than a tenth of us cyclists do.
Runners talk about beer most of all in describing activities. We cyclists talk most about coffee (leading by a long shot overall), but we still manage to out-talk those runners about beer for our second most important post-ride pastime.
There’s big improvements in the number of bike commuters year-on-year as well – up 42.8% globally and 30.8% in the US. There’s plenty more promising commuting data both by runners & cyclists, with big gains in several states you might not think of.
There is even more interesting data available in the full report (like the fastest riding day of the week… hint: it’s Tuesday for some reason.) So far it doesn’t look like Strava has shared the full Year in Sport report for 2018 publicly yet. When it goes live, it will be on Blog.Strava.com.
In the meantime, read about Strava’s best photo of 2018, highlighting how women athletes are still fighting (hard) to get an even share in sport.
