Strava By Night - The Next Killer App?

Introduction

Everybody knows about the upcoming launch of Strava By Night, ever since news of this top secret project was leaked to the Daily Peloton.  I had to wonder, though:  why all the secrecy?  On a hunch that Strava has been quietly working with other companies to offer tie-in products, timed to hit the market together, I began making inquiries within the cycling industry.  Surprisingly, my Rolodex served me well, and now—though I missed the big scoop that the Daily Peloton got—I can offer some small scoops on related products in the works.

But first, my questions for Strava

The first company I wanted to talk to was, of course, Strava.  They’ve been famously tight-lipped with the mainstream media about Strava By Night, but we bloggers have our ways.  To my luck, an employee with knowledge of the initiative opened up to me, cagily at first but ultimately with enough enthusiasm that I have started to wonder if media leakage isn’t just part of Strava’s marketing plan.

First, I asked the predictable question, why Strava By Night?  Why open up a special KOM category that requires a segment to be ridden after dark, when conditions are much more perilous?  The employee replied, “Right off the bat, this seemed like a compelling idea just because it’s so easy to implement.  We’re already getting very precise GPS data about these workouts, and it’s trivial to index a user’s longitude and latitude, and the ride date and time, to a static table of civil twilight data.  So the eligibility for the SBN leader board is easy to establish, and we can just as easily publish the SBN eligibility timeframes on the website, with daily updates, for each user’s profile.”

“Beyond that,” he continued, “we obviously needed a reason to do it.  We talk a lot in this company about KOM saturation.  If you live in Cat Butt, Wyoming it’s probably not hard to get some KOMs, for segments of just about any [elevation] profile.  In popular Strava markets like the Bay Area, though, high KOM rankings are very difficult, particularly for older athletes—who are our key demographic, by the way, because of their income.  There are too many pros snapping up all the KOMs and these less seasoned cyclists are starting to get frustrated.  So, downhill segments, rewarding cajones  and drive over pure ability, have served that clientele very well for awhile.  But even those KOMs are becoming harder to get as Strava users improve their bike handling.  Essentially we have a problem of a finite number of KOMs needing to satisfy what we hope is a practically infinite pool of users.  SBN opens up a whole new realm, where boldness is even more highly rewarded.”

But what about safety and liability, I asked.  His response was emphatic:  “Look, the law is very clear on this point.  Strava is not a content provider.  We provide the framework for the competition, but that framework isn’t egging people on:  it’s the end users throwing down the gauntlet by putting up those KOMs.  They are the content providers, not us.  It’s not our job to provide a working prefrontal cortex for these people.”

But wait, I protested:  won’t users  just label most downhill nighttime segments as hazardous?  “Yes, that can happen, and that’s nothing new, but obviously there’s a built-in fix for that:  somebody else will just create a new segment with slightly different beginning and end points, like they already do.  Of course too much of that can frustrate people, but the social stigma of ruining everybody’s fun is generally enough to keep these segments open.  It’s worth pointing out that traditional cyclists, the kind who get their jollies going fast uphill and on flats and only during daytime, will probably be big boosters of SBN even though they themselves won’t use it.  With SBN, these daylight guys won’t have as many Strava downhillers barreling past them all the time.”

Light and Motion

Next I checked in with various makers of bike lights, and hit pay dirt with Light and Motion.  A member of their product development group, Burt McClure, spoke candidly with me about an SBN offering.  “Yeah, we’re doing a new light.  We’ve done a lot of R&D on this and have actually ended up revamping our approach, for this one model.  Instead of a very small bulb designed to balance high lumen output with great battery life, we’ve gone in a kind of gonzo direction with a bulb more like what you’d get in a photocopier.  Burn time is only about five to ten minutes, and the battery is a four-pound beast, but we think most of these Strava By Night segments will be short, and since they’re predominantly downhill, weight won’t matter.  And the brightness?  This puppy puts out 5000 lumens.  You could see the shadow cast by a grain of sand.  It’s a very exciting product for a niche market.” 

Google Glass

Next I made the rounds of all the young dudes in Mission Street lofts and Palo Alto tree houses who create Glassware—third party apps for Google Glass—to see if they were doing anything.  (I’d started with Google but they blew me off completely.)  Mike “Mudguts” Brack, head of a startup called GlassGnar, has been working closely with Strava on a descent-themed app.  “It’s an amazing tie-in.  With our app, Glass syncs up more or less continuously with the Strava or SBN KOM leader board.  When it detects you’re on an established segment it begins tracking your speed and time and comparing them dynamically with leaders’ metrics throughout that segment.  It locates your leader board position and displays it in real time on the Glass (all nicely backlit, of course).  When your KOM position starts to slip, the display number flashes red.  When your placing improves it flashes green.  The app may even give verbal encouragement through a Bluetooth earbud, like quotes from great movies—you know, ‘Metal damage … brain damage … YOU SHOULD SEE THE DAMAGE, BRONZE!’  It will help these athletes identify the weaknesses in their descending so they can step up their game.  And psychologically—man, it’s like nitro in your air/fuel mix.” 

I asked Mudguts if he was worried about danger and liability, and he just snorted.  “But I’m glad you asked,” he said, “because you’ve got to talk to my brother-in-law.  When he heard of my app he started working on something of his own.”

Insurance

Mudguts’ brother-in-law, Don Bruce, Jr., works for a boutique life insurance company called The S Group.  “We’re working on a new policy,” he explained, “that is like secondary life insurance.  As you know, life insurance companies don’t like to pay out policies for accidental deaths that might not be accidental.  There’s a widespread belief out there, right or wrong, that when a head of household wants to commit suicide, but doesn’t want to leave his family penniless, he gets his pilot’s license and flies a little Cessna into the side of a cliff.  Such deaths get a lot of scrutiny, and Strava By Night may end up slotting right into that profile.  This new policy will only kick in when a traditional life insurance provider refuses to pay.  So if your husband dies doing Strava By Night, you don’t have to worry:  your family will be covered.”  I asked if this policy will actually be called “Strava insurance,” and he said, “I’d like to do that but obviously I can’t.”  Besides, he said, he’s imagining the target market will be slightly broader than just Strava or SBN users.

Garmin

And what about Garmin?  After all, cycling-specific GPS instruments are what made Strava possible in the first place.  Will they be building an SBN-specific device?  Not exactly.  A member of the product development team at Garmin, who spoke with me on condition of anonymity, described a new product, codenamed the Edge 910 SBN, that will serve what he described as the “nocturnal market.”  Though he was coy about the exact design intent of this model, he allowed that, in addition to a backlight that can be easily turned on and off, the device features a breathalyzer.  “This is simply to help the cyclist ride responsibly,” he said.  “There’s no indication at this time that Strava has intentions of creating any more new KOM categories.”  (He spoke carefully, but I think I saw him wink.)

Disclaimer

I truly hope you’ve grasped that this is a work of fiction.  No, there is no Strava By Night, and every single product, person, and concept mentioned in this blog post is purely a product of my imagination.

The Bigger Picture

Introduction

The character of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is often held up as the poster child for indecisiveness. However, the literary elite have called him the most intelligent character in all of literature. Indecision can be a sign of intelligence, while at the other end of the spectrum are people who are great at making up their minds and sticking to their guns (often literally), and who keep things simple by refusing to consider, process, or otherwise pay attention to conflicting information.

This post is about the struggle to see the bigger picture—not in books or plays, but the little trials that pepper our lives. I offer three case studies from my life to illustrate the complexities of honing your perspective.

Case study #1 – The Escalator

I was hurrying to Bart, the Bay Area commuter train, heading home from work. As I made my way down the escalator, two steps at a time, my train was rolling into the station below—it looked like I’d just make it. But suddenly, an obstruction: a couple was standing, side by side, instead of walking down the escalator. The young man, eighteen or so, was kind of hanging on his girlfriend. They seemed to be in their own little world, like Tony and Maria when they meet for the first time at the high school dance in “West Side Story”—you know, where the rest of the dancers blur out, the music becomes muted, and the two have tunnel vision (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here and watch from a little over 4½ minutes in). Now, I’m all for people getting together and enjoying their romance and everything, but in a crowded train station during the commute hour? I was pretty ticked. I mean, who did they think they were? Were they so busy being in love they didn’t realize they were holding people up?

On top of being about to miss my train, my own annoyance annoyed me. I felt that I ought to be one of those philosophical types who thinks, “Ah, young love!” and sighs with pleasure, maybe winks at the happy couple. But I wasn’t the magnanimous sort—I was a rushed commuter absorbed in his own impatience, barely calm enough to accept the delay, much less think happy thoughts about the young lovers. Was I jealous of these two, of their youth and their fresh romance and carefree attitude? Or was I really just in a hurry? I was on the brink of saying, “Excuse me, coming through!” or perhaps glaring at them. But ultimately I managed to suck it up and simply resign myself to getting the next train.

Good thing. As I followed the pair off the escalator and got a better look, I realized that the guy was blind. He wasn’t hanging on his girlfriend—he was just getting some help on the escalator. I was instantly awash with relief for not having said or done anything. What a jerk I’d have seemed if I’d rushed them along or given them stink-eye. How certain I’d been about my instant assessment of the situation—and how wrong! I think back to this near-miss whenever I’m on the brink of a snap judgment during a social conflict.

Case Study #2 – The Plastic Bag

Recently I was working on something in my home office when I heard my daughter Lindsay bawling. I figured it would be a typically short-lived outburst, but she kept it up for awhile. When it became obvious my wife wasn’t going to do anything about it, I asked her what our daughter was crying about. “A plastic bag,” she replied, a hint of annoyance in her voice.

If you think I’m about to speak ill of my wife, think again. I can relate to her frustration. Lindsay cries a lot. This isn’t uncommon for her age, but that doesn’t make the crying any quieter. And as parents, we’re torn about how to react. If we run over and make a big fuss, we’re kind of indulging our daughter, perhaps even promoting her outsized response to life’s frustrations. And by making a big show of sympathy we may be dragging out her despair, helping her overinflate a minor grievance.

I was the crying kind of kid myself, but by older brothers never let me get away with it. They’d mock me, sarcastically gushing, “Oh, poor little baby!” Of course this made me feel worse, and cry harder, but it made me mad, too, and I credit the frequent repetition of this scenario with helping to make me the scrapper that I am today. Being retroactively grateful for my brothers’ taunts, I cannot default to coddling my own child whenever she cries.

Still, Lindsay was obviously really upset about something, and anyway I felt like taking a break from what I’d been doing, so I sought her out. She tried to run away—being more angry than sad, I realized—but I scooped her up, grabbed a chair, and sat her down on my lap. (Another reason for my intervention: it won’t be long before she’s too big to sit on my lap, so I’m enjoying it while I can.) I asked her to tell me all about it. As she sputtered and sobbed, the full story gradually came out.

Her older sister Alexa had a friend over and they were playing at something that involved large Ziploc bags. Lindsay was tagging along, and the two older girls gave her a bag and asked her to fill it with water and bring it back to them. But it was a trick: the bag had a hole in it! They expected her to carry the thing back leaking water all over the place; if they were lucky, she’d even get in trouble.

This is the kind of thing older siblings are always doing. I remember one time during my pre-teen years when I was at a video arcade with a friend playing Tempest and we got tired of my friend’s little brother hanging around watching us play. So we gave him fifteen cents and told him to head down to Dairy Queen, a couple blocks away, to buy us some whip. (I’d once seen it on the menu under “toppings.”) Happy to be included, even in a servile role, my friend’s brother gamely headed out on the errand. It was a really hot summer day, and this was the most popular Dairy Queen in town, and the poor kid stood in line for at least half an hour before getting to the little window and being told he couldn’t just buy whip by itself. He came back bearing the bad news, and—managing not to laugh—we scolded him: “Doggone it, we told you to get us whip! What do you mean they won’t sell it to you?! It’s right there on the menu! Now you march straight back there and get us our whip!” (We will both go to Hell for this, of course.)

Mostly, though, I was on the other end of these sibling affairs, being brushed off by older brothers who wanted nothing to do with me. I remember once how Max (the next oldest) and I once wanted to play in our bigger brothers’ friend’s clubhouse. They refused to let us in. Max demanded a reason, so they told him it was because his nose was running and he had an ugly bruise on his forehead. They even made a song to taunt him with: “No snotty-pot bruise-heads allowed in the clubhouse!”

Now, Lindsay’s response to her sister’s prank was pretty clever—she was no dupe. She spotted the hole in the bag, and instead of merely pointing out the older girls’ treachery (which would have accomplished nothing), she devised a clever retaliatory plan: she would swap out the defective bag for a perfect one, and casually return with it properly filled, not leaking a drop. She could pretend to be sweetly accommodating, and watch with delight as the other girls, astonished, beheld her achievement. It would be, in the parlance of childhood triumphs, a “burn-royal-fry.” (If this term confuses you, allow me to explain. When I was a kid, getting the better of somebody was called a “burn.” Getting him real good was a “burn-royal.” A true burn-royal-fry, needless to say, was exceedingly rare.)

But (my daughter now sobbed), her plan did not work out. She managed to obtain a good Ziploc bag, but in the process of trying to open it, she ripped it, and it turned out to be the last Ziploc bag in the house, and now everything was ruined. This was the real cause of the outburst: she’d had the perfect plan but she botched it through sheer clumsiness and haplessness. She was furious with herself.

Poor kid. It’s my fault: she’s clearly got the Albert self-flogging gene. Not all of us Alberts have it, but it’s not uncommon in our family. Of course, this excess of self criticism—a refusal to be compassionate with oneself—is not unique to us. I remember a childhood pal who made a mistake during his piano recital and actually stopped playing so he could smack himself in the head and say, “Stupid! Stupid!” I’ve also seen self-flogging behavior on TV when a pro soccer player has screwed up and falls to his knees, tearing at his hair. Etc.

But the self-flogging gene isn’t all bad; it all depends on how it pans out. If it leads you toward sorrow, you can become paralyzed, depressed. But if it leads to toward anger, you might either a) hit yourself in the head and say “Stupid!” or b) take some constructive action. So, hearing Lindsay’s story now, I realized the best thing I could do would be salvage her original scheme. I found some food in a large Ziploc in the fridge, dumped it out, and gave her the bag. Her spirits were instantly restored, and she galloped happily away toward the sink.

My point here is that to fully appreciate Lindsay’s grief, it’s not enough to know about the ripped bag. You also have to have been a younger sibling: it takes an understanding of the casual cruelty with which an older sibling turns the younger into a plaything on the way to rejecting her. Moreover, it takes a kindred pugnacious spirit. And, to truly feel Lindsay’s pain at the ripped bag, you need to share with her the self-flogging gene. Given the full picture of the poor kid’s angst, it’s almost a miracle she found anybody who could truly understand and relate.

Case Study #3 - Mad Max

When I was about twelve, I saw “Mad Max,” an action movie about a renegade cop taking revenge on a gang of psychotic bikers. But I came in late, to a scene where one of the cops, Jim Goose, goes berserk and tries to beat up some guy, and has to be held back by his fellow cops. I was fairly horrified at his behavior.

However, some time later I saw the whole movie from the beginning, and had a totally different reaction. Goose was a hugely likeable character, and the guy he tried to beat up, Johnny the Boy, was a little bastard who liked to terrorize small towns, raping and pillaging just for fun. In the scene where Goose loses his temper, Johnny and various other thugs had just been released from prison because no witnesses showed up for the trial, being too cowed by the gang to testify. In this context, Goose’s outburst seemed completely appropriate, and I was swept right along with the rest of the movie, where Max hunts down the gang members one by one and murders them.

For years I had fond memories of that film, and my brothers and friends and I frequently quoted bits of its dialog, but somewhere along the line it dawned on me that this movie is a guilty pleasure at best. Obviously it’s not a morality tale, and isn’t supposed to be anything but entertainment, but for a mature person to fully buy into the revenge fantasy, as I had as a teenager, would be kind of sick. My malleable teenage mind, I have come to understand, had been manipulated by the filmmakers. Looking back at Goose’s blowup, I realize my reaction has come full circle: I was right to be appalled when I first saw it.

This presents an interesting case in my “big picture” discussion. Sometimes a total lack of context is just fine, because context doesn’t always matter. For example, police brutality is never okay, period. Looking at a somewhat bigger picture—such as the one the filmmakers made—gets you into dangerous territory: you’re lured into an extreme position by a totally one-sided narrative. The real big picture here requires a nuanced appreciation for what a filmmaker may do to titillate a jaded audience, without regard to how his movie, and others like it, may gradually pollute our attitudes.

The upshot of today’s exploration?

• Stop and think, hard, before you accost a complete stranger.
• Appreciate that, though it might take a highly specific perspective to realize it, sometimes a plastic bag is actually worth crying over.
• Try to remember that in the quest for the big picture, sometimes bigger isn’t big enough.

dana albert blog

Sean’s Fiery Wreck

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Introduction

An otherwise perfect ride with my bike club on Sunday was marred by a crash toward the end. No, it wasn’t a fiery wreck as promised in the title, but it was pretty spectacular. The guy who crashed, Sean, wasn’t seriously hurt, or I wouldn’t be so cavalier about treating his crash like fodder for cheap blog entertainment. I e-mailed the club with a photo I’d snapped with my smartphone (below), and naturally those who weren’t there wanted to know what happened. As Sean’s e-mailed rendering of the tale ran barely over fifty words, I decided to flesh it out a bit. So here’s my version of what happened, as seen from about fifty meters behind.


Sean’s fiery wreck

Well, there’s not much to tell about Sean’s crash that he didn’t already mention, but upon reflection I realize the crash was all but prefigured at several points in our ride. Consider: at Royal, EZ commented on my Road ID bracelet (I said I wore it to appease the wife; he thought that might backfire by merely reminding her of the danger). This isn’t remarkable in itself, except that we seldom talk about crashing; it’s almost a taboo topic for some of us. Then, at the top of Tunnel, several guys chided me for continuing to ride a cracked bike frame; several theories were put forth on how catastrophic a seat tube failure could be. Then, as we prepared to descend Skyline, Campbell (noting the wet roads) facetiously advised the guys up front to take the curves as fast as possible, perhaps locking up the rear wheel to slide it around. “That works in mountain biking,” I pointed out, sparking a discussion of the physics of high-siding and a tale of my ill-fated attempt, while drunk, to do a 180 in snow without planting my foot. Later in the ride, not ten minutes before the actual crash, a few of us discussed Sean’s odd sartorial technique of removing the chamois from an old pair of shorts so he can layer two pairs of shorts on cold days. Muzzy asked, “How much insulation do you get from 1/8” of Lycra?” I pointed out (or did I only think it?), “Probably good for limiting crash damage, anyway.” All this crash talk … could we sense fate lurking in the background? It wasn’t a day for the Grim Reaper to come looking for a soul, but perhaps we had a collective hunch that the Grim Weed-Whacker might be seeking a flesh offering…

So: the crash itself. We were coming down Nine Mile … okay, I’ll confess, I have no idea what the road was called, and if I’d gotten dropped on the ride I’d still be out there trying to find my way home. We were … somewhere. We’d just finished sprinting for some city limit sign … okay, I didn’t sprint. I was in the middle of a fascinating conversation with Muzzy about the fallacy of treating economics as a hard science (when no two economists can agree on a past observed phenomenon, much less the current state of affairs and what we can expect in the future), and it would have been very rude to suddenly abandon the discussion to sprint, especially when I would’ve gotten my ass kicked anyway. So we were still chatting away on this downhill, our group spread out pretty well after the sprint, when suddenly—BLAM!

The loud noise was all it took: my mental reins were passed over to the brain stem, which is so good at rapid, instinctive computation that time seemed to slow waaaaaay down such that the next five or ten seconds felt like minutes. (On a pre-dawn ride recently, my field of vision limited to the sweep of my headlight, my conscious mind thought, “Hey, why the hell am I stopping?” only after I’d slammed on the brakes. The lizard brain replied, “Because there’s some big object in your way.” The frontal cortex said, “My god, you’re right! It’s a fricking deer! Good eye, Albert!”) This is where split-second reaction time seems like child’s play. I had all the time in the world to wonder if perhaps somebody had been shot. (The brain stem, though quick, isn’t very bright.) Am I hit? Am I bleeding? Eventually I realized, okay, that was not a gunshot, somebody blew a tire. It wasn’t immediately obvious who, though, or how. (Evidently there was a pothole; I never saw it.)

Up ahead, Sean went into a gnarly fishtail. If he’d been on a snowmobile, deliberately oversteering and goosing the throttle, he’d have thrown up a glorious roostertail of snow. A nonverbal snippet of my earlier high-siding conversation with Campbell flitted by. But Sean didn’t flip; instead his rear tire reversed its course and fished across to the left. For a millisecond a memory flashed in my mind like distant lightning: I was racing a criterium in Colorado Springs, and a guy who’d just taken a flyer lost control in a chicane and fishtailed, and I knew—complete conviction—that he was doomed, and he was. Now, however, with a connoisseur’s appreciation of bike handling, I marveled at the certainty that Sean would save this one. Even when he fishtailed again, back to the right, I just knew he’d ultimately pull it out. Except he didn’t.

As he crashed, I continued to occupy that roomy brain space where everything seemed to happen in slo-mo. Have you ever seen the Star Trek episode where Kirk enters some special physical realm and is sped up so everybody on the Enterprise (except a beautiful babe from the planet) seems to be moving so slowly as to almost be stationary? It was kind of like that, only without the babe. Now I was watching Sean fall, assessing his falling skill like a sommelier sampling a fine wine. His hand slapped the ground, but he didn’t stupidly plant it, as though he could keep his body off the ground, like so many hapless newbies would do, breaking a shoulder in the process. Nor did he tense up, nor did he sprawl like a sack of potatoes. Kind of a nice springy landing, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to see him end up on his feet like Pee Wee Herman. But it was a pretty bad crash. By the time we got there he was just sitting there, trying to scream with his face ripped off.

Whoah! That totally wasn’t the case. I thought I might have lost your interest there and figured I better snap you back to attention. (That was, of course, a line from “Mad Max.”) As you know from the photo, Sean’s face was never in danger—he didn’t so much as scuff his helmet. I knew he’d be okay because he jumped right up and got himself and his bike out of the road. When a guy really slaps down hard, and lies there dazed for a few seconds, then it’s time to worry. You could probably develop a model for predicting the severity of injuries based solely on how many seconds elapse before a crashed cyclist takes care of himself. (When I got hit by a car two summers ago, it was at least five seconds before I even started cussing.) Somehow, Sean had managed to shed a lot of speed before finally hitting the asphalt. We must have been going fast—my bike was still in the highest gear when I stopped—and if he hadn’t managed to slow down a lot, he’d have cartwheeled like Jan did on Highway 24 last summer.

Sean’s hand was ripped up, right through his glove. No road rash was visible, but he knew he was bleeding underneath his layers of shorts. The bike looked to be unrideable: both tires had peeled off their rims, and holes had been ripped in their sidewalls; his rear rim was badly dented. These were spanking new Ksyriums, too … both totaled, what a shame. Campbell, closest to home, pedaled off to get his car. After gawking at the bike damage for awhile, we did some Flat Repair by Committee. No longer was my brain stretching out seconds for better reaction time; rather, our actual progress was truly happening in slow motion. Let’s face it, crashes are exciting, and so long as nobody’s seriously hurt, it’s hard not to chatter away about everything, much as I’m doing now, at the expense of efficiency. We booted both tires, pumped the rear up to about forty pounds (anything more and the tire could blow off the damaged rim), called Campbell to cancel the car-lift, and escorted our fallen hero on home.