Strava Suffer Score decoded
Strava recently debuted its "Suffer Score", which attempts to quantify in one way how hard an activity was. Suffer score, they claim, is based on heartrate: ride further or harder and suffer score is higher. Suffer score is a good move for Strava. Strava's market segment is informal competition. Other web sites have logged how far people ride, and where, but Strava really locked into the demand for competition: competition via social networking. To date these rankings have been based primarily on speed over "segments": routes defined by users, for example on roads or trails, typically up climbs. They then added contests for volume: most miles ridden in a week and most feet climbed, for example. But with Suffer Score, they combine the two: a metric combining both quantity and quantity. Why's this important? Of course not everyone can climb fast enough to compete for KOMs on popular climbs. But a heartrate-based metric levels the playing field to ...
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