Social cycling with Strava

I've recently been trying out Strava. Strava is a cool social app that uses GPS and other data collected during activities such as cycling and running from all kinds of devices. There's a Strava website where you can search for an follow other Strava users, keep track of their activities, compare your times with others users over the same routes, and monitor your improvement. Most Strava users seem to use it for cycling stats. Strava has apps for the Apple iPhone and Android mobile devices, so it's dead easy to keep track of your activities and share them online. Alternatively you can upload your workout activity data from a Garmin device as I do. Strava has some neat features such as league tables to record who is the fastest over a route, and some important security features to hide locations like your place of work and home from other Strava users.

Strava have kindly provided a couple of widgets you can use to display your activity stats in a webpage. Here's one showing the my most recent workouts.

Before trying out Strava I'd been using Garmin Connect, which is a similar website-based tool for uploading, tracking and sharing activity stats. Garmin Connect does have good support for analysis of stats though it also currently lacks the social featues of Strava, which can be frustrating. I really like the comprehensive stats available to me in Garmin Connect but the extra social features make the Strava experience richer and more interesting. I'm definitely hooked.