Thursday, September 11, 2014

Veloviewer Usage

As I was putting up my new blog, I was linking to everything that I have been using lately.  Veloviewer is one thing that I don't think a lot of people use, while they may use Strava, Veloviewer for me even though I haven't been running for very long sure keeps me excited about how my training is going.

I am going to pull a few descriptions from their website with some of my own commentary (from the perspective a newbie runner);

First things first go to http://www.veloviewer.com/ your screen should show something along these lines;


Pretty self explanatory now - click the button that says "Connect with STRAVA" - it may take you to another screen within Strava to allow the connection.  Just say yes.

You will then come to a page to import all of your activities into the veloviewer database;


Click the button to "get everything" (this may take a long time depending on how many it needs to grab)

Now you can start exploring.

I would rather not screenshot every page but just give you an idea of all of the different tabs - you can see in the previous picture there are tabs along the top;

  • Summary - as it says a real good summary of what you have been doing along with some graphs.  I mostly run but I have a few rides that skew the graphs a bit so I will just click on runs that gives me a great year over year view of my progress.  On the graphs you can click buttons as well that give you elevation or distance.  That is what really made my day - I only have about 2.5 years of data so far and it is interesting and easy to see when I made my transition from running on the roads to running on the trails my elevation starts to go through the roof, this year alone I have already exceeded all of my climb from last year :) So much to explore on just the summary page, I would just suggest you look around.
  • Challenges - kinda neat but just a summary screen of all of the challenges you signed up for in Strava and where you are on those.
  • Activities - If you just want to see runs or rides you can click the pull down next to config and select either.  Some Filters that are interesting that are predefined - Another neat item is the map and chart buttons on the side. You will notice the button on the bottom you can export this to CSV (Comma-Separated Values) so you can easily import into any spreadsheet application.
  • Segments - Now this is Strava's bread and butter - so so neat, you really just have to play around here because you can see your position then you can also see how far you are behind the leader (maybe find some segments to go out and snipe :) ).  A lot of ways to sort and explore, this is where I play around the most I think.
  • Wheel - Just another visual way to look at your activities and climbs! Fun to click on different parts of the wheel.
  • Signature Image - I have played around here but never needed a signature so just something for you that might want to show off that way :)
  • Rivals - If you run with someone a lot and do the same segments, they will show up as a rival.  and you can view their data. Some of these people I will never beat but I have one or two of the CR's and that makes me happy enough :)

  • Update - Now we are full circle - this is the same screen that you loaded all of your runs.  I go in and update about once a week maybe once ever couple of weeks when I have a long conference call and can just spend some time looking at the data figuring out my next run :)

That is it - just a fun view of Strava for those of you that use it, this makes it even more useful.  He has a few other tools out there.  

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