Monday, February 22, 2010

Strava poaching

On my commute from SF to nVidia, there are nine (maybe ten now) Strava Segments.
None of these are particularly interesting pieces of road, they just happen to be on
a route that dozens of people ride multiple times per week on their commute, specifically a lot of SF2G riders who are Stravans.

Examples:
SF2G Airport Sprint - a half mile chunk of pavement a jersey barrier away from US 101
Wailing Wall - pothole ridden strip of asphalt in between a trailer park and a sound barrier.

I can't think of any of these I would ride without a good reason. Commuting to work is a fairly good reason. So since we ride this crapola a lot, we have our fun seeing our times on the various parts of our humdrum suburban commute.

Recently it was noticed that a new name landed on the leaderboard of pretty much all of these random crappy segments.



Re: evil lucas

Scott Crosby wrote:

heh, so it appears Lucas P. is doing repeats of the strava sections to own
the leaderboard, that scoundrel. For the lagoon (theo) sprint for example:

3 Lucas Pereira Sat, Feb 20, 2010 17.6 143 108 (PM)
4 Lucas Pereira Sat, Feb 20, 2010 11.3 155 93 (PM)
5 Lucas Pereira Sat, Feb 20, 2010 19.9 146 158 (PM)

so he's going on weekends to attack all the records, pretty funny.

we came pretty close to getting that one today, but will have to step it
up a bit more:

1 Lucas Pereira Sat, Feb 06, 2010 32.3 177 478 (PM) 1:09
2 Scott Crosby about 4 hours ago 29.0 175 425 1:17
3 Christon DeWan about 4 hours ago 27.9 179 441 1:20

Poaching segments is hereby considered Bullshit, and we must now destroy
all these Lucas records.

-sc


As a new father who hasn't ridden on a weekend in months, I have to say I am pretty disgusted that someone would take their weekend and do sprint repeats past the parking lots and hotels next to the airport where the Anza Lagoon Sprint section is. Not to mention he rides the rest of our crappy commute to get there to do the repeats in the first place (at least he doesn't appear to drive), when he lives close to some of the best riding in the world.

As new segments get added, Lucas goes off to do his repeats on the new segment. There is a house of ill repute in East Palo Alto where unsavory folks tend to hang out. Perhaps we will add a new strava segment there and force Lucas to do endless repeats on the mean streets of EPA. Of course, there is always the less savory tactic of going out with a car and beating all of his sprint times by a second, forcing him to go back and try to re-earn them - this is considered cheating and will not stand.

7 comments:

BikeBoy said...

Sounds like desperation to me... very tacky.

ammon said...

He even stomped your Late to caltrain Evelyn route 4 days after you created it as part of sprint workouts.

If google made the right match, he's from Belmont and has always been obsessed with PR stats. He's improved from the late 90s

linked from the web 1.0:
They're not very fast, but it's always fun to set a personal best, no matter what the speed

murphstahoe said...

Before Lucas was chasing random Strava segments, he was a legend for This Page

The world always collapses on itself. Lucas Pereira wrote what was my bible for hill climbing in the Bay Area circa 1998, and now he is chasing us all around the Bay Area thanks to technology that rendered his bible obsolete. Well, not really, those graphs are very cool and Garmin can't really replicate it - not even Topo really compares.

djconnel said...

I have used Lucas's datathe Low-Key Hillclimbs, I can't count. Lucas can do anything he wants, as far as I'm concerned. He also has some interesting aero test data on his web site, done with crude coast-down tests. Good stuff.

As long as he's not riding with a motor, it's all fair game.

scrosby said...

I'm the first to get sucked into a competition, so I don't fault Lucas for his compulsion to own all these arbitrary strava records. It's a funny way to spend a saturday, but then again, so's sitting in your garage all day gluing on tubulars when you're racing Cs anyway (that would be me).

I think the interesting thing is that strava's ability to allow time-displaced competition is so effective, god bless 'em.

All my comments should be considered "in good fun", nothing negative. Lucas is a good guy.

-sc

ammon said...

whoah, the grade page is most impressive. Gotta admire that level of exploration and analysis. That page begs for a refresh with official maps & strava segments linked.

murphstahoe said...

Lucas is the man - but come on, what is cycling without trash talk! Let the wild rumpus begin!