NMTS Strava Club

NMTS has expanded its presence on the web and has entered the world of social media. Strava.com is like Facebook for cycling and NMTS has started a club there. Many of you already use online services like Garmin Connect with your GPS bike computers to track your riding, and Strava serves a similar purpose. Unfortunately, Garmin Connect isn't very good at sharing your activities with others or promoting cycling clubs. Strava, however, makes it easy to share detailed information about club rides (past and future) with club members and the cycling community in general. Non-members on the fence about coming out for a ride with us for the first time can now see exactly what we're doing in near real-time. Members can see what rides they missed and who's planning on riding tomorrow. It's our hope that using Strava will help us have more fun riding and let more people see what they are missing by not becoming members.

Go to strava.com and select "Sign Up for free". You'll be asked to create an account either through Facebook or directly with an email address. You will then be given the option to search for Facebook friends who also have Strava accounts. Then you will be given the option to select your gender and sport preference. Now you've got an account!

If you start rides from your house or work and don't want people to see where your live you can have any number of areas blanked out when they are posted online. Towards the upper right of the screen you can hover over an icon and select "settings". On the left side of the page select "privacy". Enter the address of anywhere you'd like to keep private under "Hide your house/office on your activity maps" and select "Create privacy zone". You should now see your hidden locations indicated on a map. Strava does a pretty good job of randomizing routes through your privacy zones so they don't just appear as empty spots on the map.

Other security options include "Enhanced privacy". Select this option to keep your last name from being displayed and to require other users to get your approval for them to follow your activities. By default, Strava uses all your ride information to create cycling basemaps for route creation. You can op-out of this by de-selecting "Strava Metro & Heatmap". The privacy page is also where you can go to delete your account.

You can make rides private so that only you can see them. Once a ride is uploaded, select it and click the little pencil icon on the left of the screen. From there you can select "private" and then "save and view ride". You can also change the title of your ride and add details to let everyone know that it was a sanctioned NMTS ride, that it was fun, that your time was awful because you had to stop and help someone fix a flat and that Heartbreak Hill really did break your heart.

Strava and Garmin have recently made transferring data between them very easy. To link your Garmin Connect account hover over the red + on the top right of the page and select "upload activity". Select "get started" under Garmin. You will be given the option to "Connect with Garmin". Select this and you will be redirected to Garmin where you enter your Garmin Connect login information and that's it. All new rides you upload to Garmin Connect will be automatically linked to Strava.

At the top of the page hover over "explore" and select "clubs". Search for "New Mexico Touring Society" and select "Join". Now you can see what everyone else is doing! You can see upcoming rides and select "I'm in" to let other members know you're going to ride. Weekly stats for riders are shown at the bottom of the page. Over on the left you can click on the icons under "members" to see specifics of the members riding history. On the member pages you can opt to "follow" the member and see all their activities on your Strava dashboard page.

You can fill out your profile with whatever information your feel like sharing. The base account is free, but there is a pay "premium" service that allows you to analyze heart rate monitors, power meters, and do detailed tracking of your training if you're interested in that kind of stuff.

NMTS point of contact: David Jewell, Cell: 505-710-8350; Email: davjew@gmail.com

Member, League of American Bicyclists

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