From Barry Saeed, our FFBC Ride coordinator:
Even though we have limited FFBC group rides, we can still have fun as a club. Whether road bike, mountain bike or e-bike, real-world or virtual, FFBC’s Strava and RideWithGPS groups offer us ways to stay connected and celebrate our members’ accomplishments.
Strava: Many members (and non-members) have joined Strava’s open, unmoderated FFBC club (https://www.strava.com/clubs/ffbc). Strava’s FFBC club has weekly leaderboards showing distance, elevation gain, number of rides, etc. (Unfortunately, Strava limits its Challenges to corporate sponsors so FFBC cannot have its own challenges.)
RideWithGPS: RWGPS has a members-only FFBC Club, and it is our main repository of club routes. RWGPS allows FFBC to create its own “Goals” for distance, elevation and moving time, similar to Strava’s Challenges. They aren’t really goals in the sense of having numerical targets, but they do have leaderboards to see how club members (and some lapsed members) are doing.
As an experiment, I have set RWGPS goals for June. To join RWGPS’s goals, sign into your account, click on any link below, and tap Join. You may join all three goals if you’d like.
- Distance: https://ridewithgps.com/goals/15591
- Elevation: https://ridewithgps.com/goals/15593
- Moving Time: https://ridewithgps.com/goals/15594
Once you join the goals, you will see them on the right side of your RWGPS dashboard.
If you’re not quite sure how to set up and load rides into Strava and RideWithGPS, see the tips below.
Did I mention this is an experiment? We may have some rough spots with RWGPS goals the first month; contact me directly if you experience problems. If the service works well, and if more than a handful of club members join, then we will try again in July. (Maybe, in addition to our regular group rides’ Pedal Pounders, we’ll celebrate some leaderboard accomplishments at the end of the year, but, for now, let’s just have fun experimenting.)
Happy, safe riding!
Barry
Join Strava’s FFBC Club: https://www.strava.com/clubs/ffbc. After joining the club, on your Strava dashboard, you will see “Your Clubs” on the right with an image. Hover over that image and it says “FFBC.” Click on the image to see the club leaderboard.
Join RideWithGPS’s FFBC Club: You must be an FFBC member in good standing to join. To do so, click this link. After registering, you will find our club logo on top-right of your RWGPS home page. Click on it to access the club site.
Load your rides into Strava: https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/223297187-How-to-get-your-Activities-to-Strava.
Load your rides into RWGPS: https://ridewithgps.com/help/connected-services. (RWGPS does not easily import virtual rides so you’re better off loading them to Strava and following the exporting/importing instructions below.)
Automatically import rides from RWGPS into Strava: https://ridewithgps.com/help/connect-with-strava.
Manually export a ride from Strava and import into RWGPS: Strava does not enable automatic imports into RWGPS so you must do each ride manually.
- In your Strava activity feed, click on your ride.
- On the left side, click on “…” and select Export GPX or Original, whichever works best for your platform (GPX is usually the best). Save to your hard drive.
- In RWGPS, click on the RWGPS bike logo at the top-left, then click on Upload, click on Select Files, select the GPX file, click Choose and complete the dialog. Your ride should now be in RWGPS.
WARNINGS: Do NOT use Strava’s bulk download option as this will export ALL your Strava activity. If you use RWGPS’s “Connect with Strava” feature, you’ll end up with duplicate ride on Strava that you’ll need to delete.
