Strava is the de facto standard of recreational cyclists for tracking their rides, and I use it too. I used to use Sports Tracker and had been doing so since their Symbian version in the 00s. Its features are absolutely crushing those of Strava’s free version but alas, they don’t have an API, which I wanted, so reluctantly I had to dump them and move to the very constrained free version of Strava a few years back. (Professional cyclists probably use Intervals.icu, but I that’s not something I’ve tried yet.)

I have, however, recently discovered a couple of great sites that make my Strava experience a little less frustrating. The first one was Statshunters. It imports your activities from Strava and builds tables and graphs from them, such as a cumulative-distance-per-year graph. It also calculates your Eddington number, which for me is currently 23 (when calculated in kilometers). If your activities in Strava are public, it should even create you a heatmap of your rides and show you the map tiles that you have conquered.

The other tool I found was Strautomator, which allows you to automate actions with your activities. I’ve set automations to tag my commutes automatically when I leave from and arrive at specific places around specific times, so that Statshunters can show stats for commutes separately. I’ve also set it up to rename certain recurring rides so that I can instantly recognize them and they’re not just called the default “Morning ride” or “Lunch ride”. Strautomator allows three automations in the free tier so you can safely test it, and a lifetime subscription costs just some $30, which I paid without batting an eye, given that it equals only some three months of Strava subscription (which I’m not paying).