Raleigh Challenge Ultra 78km GPS / Strava Notes
This weekend I completed the Raleigh Challenge Wilson Trail 78km ultra hike in Hong Kong over extremely challenging terrain. I was on a team with two friends; we each completed the full distance and finished together in 24 hours & 52 minutes.
I've posted a GPS recording of the event on Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/410467595.
Recording the GPS for this event was itself an interesting challenge. I have found reliable GPS tracking to be frustrating here in Hong Kong for a number of reasons and recently have not been wearing a watch at all on training hikes and such. But it seemed like it would be cool to try to get a GPS record of this event given its truly epic nature.
I chose to do this using the Strava app on my iPhone 6. I decided to take a “set it and forget it” mentality for better or worse, consistent with my recent attitude regarding GPS recording. I just didn’t want the repeated distraction and frustration of “is it working now? how about now?” to detract from the event. For the first part of the event I had the iPhone in an open-top pocket on my hydration pack’s shoulder strap. For the second half I generally had it in my shorts pocket in a zip-lock bag. There was some rain & cloudy skies during the event. I don’t know if these factors may have hurt its ability to get a reliable GPS signal, but honestly this quickly falls into the category of “can’t be bothered” in the spirit of not wanting the recording to be a distraction. (Also it's worth noting that we didn't really have a time goal, and the cutoff times for various checkpoints were extremely lenient in this event, so pace/split info or anything like that wasn't a priority.)
[For context, the other reasonable options I own but rejected: 1. A Suunto Ambit 2S watch which I've found produces excellent results but has very poor battery life at least in the context of ultra distance events. I've seen from other HK Strava users that this is a workable choice, maybe if I gave it another chance or (sigh) sprung for the new Ambit 3 it would work out better for me. Though I also recall some clumsiness getting activities posted through their movescount web service over to Strava — perhaps since improved. 2. A Garmin fenix 2 watch which has good results, and very good battery life, but which every now and then simply stops recording with no warning whatsoever several hours into an activity, leading to a very infurating discovery some X # of kms later. I have an open tech support ticket on the issue which I've almost entirely lost interest in pursuing. Or (sigh) I could perhaps spring for the fenix 3. 3. A classic Garmin Edge 500 that I love for cycling, and tried once or twice for hiking, but it just never quite clicked for me in the latter context, perhaps in part because it seems to have a harder time acquiring satellites here in the concrete canyons of Hong Kong.]
Due to the long nature of the event I brought a Mophie Juice Pack mini charger which I ended up using twice. I would glance at the phone at rest stops and if the battery seemed low, I would plug it into the Mophie and start charging. Our rest stops weren’t always that long, so I would leave it plugged in & charging in a ziplock back in my pocket as we continued along the hike. I’m not sure what happens if the Mophie is in charging mode and the Phone reaches 100% — does it keep providing juice as long as it’s plugged in? At the end of the hike I had about 25% iPhone battery left and the Mophie appeared to be fully spent. I know for sure it charged it back up to 100% the first time but I’m not sure it was able to do so the second time. Just in terms of raw impression, it felt like the battery drain on the iPhone during recording was perfectly reasonable. At any rate, success!
I’m very happy with the results as “a record of the event”. Beyond that it’s a bit sloppy though. Some thoughts:
I’m disappointed that it seems to think the distance was 90km. I suppose there may just be some jitter in the process, and in particular perhaps at the rest stops, but I don’t see how this could add up to an extra 12km. Then again it was a 25 hour activity so maybe all those little errors just add up. (Plus there's almost certainly a bias towards overstating distances with such errors so it's unlikely they would trend towards canceling out over time.) It would be great if there were a way to adjust the total official distance for a Strava event after upload without trimming the path, though I confess I don't know how this would work. (A dream Strava feature request is “path correction mode”, for both distance and altitude, where it more or less sorts out where you went and corrects the sloppy captured data to match the reality based on known roads & trails. This is tricky to do right so I’m happy to just leave this as a long term wish for now.)
Because I’m not that familiar with the Strava app, I accidentally started the event in “bike” mode. I had noticed this option messing around the day before when I decided I was going to use the app, and switched it to “run” mode, but it apparently switched back to “bike” when I actually started recording. This appears to have at least 2 side-effects. 1) It uses auto-pause mode (configurable via a setting) & 2) it seems to do something different regarding how it collects samples. Don’t quote me on the last part, but it seemed like something changed when I flipped it over half-way through the event. (Happily this didn’t seem to confuse it or interrupt the activity in any way.) I’m probably missing something important but in the spirit of “less is more” in app design, I would greatly prefer that there be no such thing as “bike mode” or “run mode” for recording.
Strava does have a “hike” mode for activities, though this doesn’t seem to appear in the iPhone app, and anyway I’ve found the hike mode to be not particularly well thought-out. I decided pretty early on after moving to HK to just tag all my hikes (which often include some running) as runs in Strava. In HK there’s so much crazy vertical in various trails that even if we were running parts of this event we wouldn’t be running all of it. Setting them all as runs means they all fall into the same “pool” of activities for my own history and for comparison with other HK athletes.
On the “auto-pause" point, honestly I’ve never really understood “moving time” as a useful stand-in for event duration on Strava. It seems to be a feature requested & designed by people who don’t understand how reality works. OK, sure, if there’s a lazy lunch break during a long ride, maybe you want to carve that out of your activity time, but in general, if you start an activity at 9am and finish it at 3pm, guess what? That’s a 6 hour activity. Whatever breaks you took along the way helped you finish, you can’t just wish them away. I can see the value of knowing how much of that 6 hours was spent moving, but in my world that's a detail, not the headline.
An extremely fun quirk to this event (& the Wilson Trail it’s based on) is that it includes a short trip on the Hong Kong MTR (subway) to get across Victoria Harbor! I’ll set aside the obvious problem of having no GPS signal in the subway because the straight line between valid data points at the stations is good enough I think. This section is most definitely part of the event, deserves to be part of the GPS trace line, etc., but of course also should have a special flag to indicate that we weren’t walking/running that portion. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be a way in Strava to exclude just part of an activity from PRs and similar analysis other than splitting the activity into 2. Screw that! I want one big crazy long squiggly line! A “flag just this range” feature would be very useful here but this is clearly a rare situation, so it’s hard to say this is a big failing on their part. But as a result I now have some PRs for 100m / 200m etc that seem to be forever out of reach.
Another curious fact about this activity: I switched to a different pair of shoes at the half-way point. So Strava’s feature of keeping track of what shoes I used for a given activity comes up a bit short here. Again, hard to really fault them for it.
When I went to save the activity, I was in a location with no mobile data coverage. I expected it to say something reassuring like, “this activity will be synced later”. Instead it popped up a vague error message and the activity disappeared! For the life of me (in my post-ultra hike / sleep deprived state) I couldn’t find it again, but once I did get data coverage it synced it and all was well. Phew! (Also I thought I attached a photo to the event but that didn't seem to come through, maybe that part got dropped with the network error.)
Overall I’d rate this about a B- experience. I’m extremely happy to have a record of the event and the technology to make that possible is very impressive. There’s much room for improvement around the edges, in particular the total distance discrepancy, but it’s hard to say this was anything but a success. And perhaps most importantly given my current personality quirks: the process of recording didn’t detract from the event much if at all.
If I had my dream replacement for all of this, I currently imagine it would be something along the lines of a “do one job” wristband with start/stop, highly accurate position capture, and very long battery life. Leave everything else to the post-processing. I’m not even sure what I’m thinking of is practical with current generation GPS, but who knows, perhaps there’s a Kickstarter out there waiting to happen.
Oh, P.S.: How fun is the Strava Labs Flyby feature? Nice work guys!
I've posted a GPS recording of the event on Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/410467595.
Recording the GPS for this event was itself an interesting challenge. I have found reliable GPS tracking to be frustrating here in Hong Kong for a number of reasons and recently have not been wearing a watch at all on training hikes and such. But it seemed like it would be cool to try to get a GPS record of this event given its truly epic nature.
I chose to do this using the Strava app on my iPhone 6. I decided to take a “set it and forget it” mentality for better or worse, consistent with my recent attitude regarding GPS recording. I just didn’t want the repeated distraction and frustration of “is it working now? how about now?” to detract from the event. For the first part of the event I had the iPhone in an open-top pocket on my hydration pack’s shoulder strap. For the second half I generally had it in my shorts pocket in a zip-lock bag. There was some rain & cloudy skies during the event. I don’t know if these factors may have hurt its ability to get a reliable GPS signal, but honestly this quickly falls into the category of “can’t be bothered” in the spirit of not wanting the recording to be a distraction. (Also it's worth noting that we didn't really have a time goal, and the cutoff times for various checkpoints were extremely lenient in this event, so pace/split info or anything like that wasn't a priority.)
[For context, the other reasonable options I own but rejected: 1. A Suunto Ambit 2S watch which I've found produces excellent results but has very poor battery life at least in the context of ultra distance events. I've seen from other HK Strava users that this is a workable choice, maybe if I gave it another chance or (sigh) sprung for the new Ambit 3 it would work out better for me. Though I also recall some clumsiness getting activities posted through their movescount web service over to Strava — perhaps since improved. 2. A Garmin fenix 2 watch which has good results, and very good battery life, but which every now and then simply stops recording with no warning whatsoever several hours into an activity, leading to a very infurating discovery some X # of kms later. I have an open tech support ticket on the issue which I've almost entirely lost interest in pursuing. Or (sigh) I could perhaps spring for the fenix 3. 3. A classic Garmin Edge 500 that I love for cycling, and tried once or twice for hiking, but it just never quite clicked for me in the latter context, perhaps in part because it seems to have a harder time acquiring satellites here in the concrete canyons of Hong Kong.]
Due to the long nature of the event I brought a Mophie Juice Pack mini charger which I ended up using twice. I would glance at the phone at rest stops and if the battery seemed low, I would plug it into the Mophie and start charging. Our rest stops weren’t always that long, so I would leave it plugged in & charging in a ziplock back in my pocket as we continued along the hike. I’m not sure what happens if the Mophie is in charging mode and the Phone reaches 100% — does it keep providing juice as long as it’s plugged in? At the end of the hike I had about 25% iPhone battery left and the Mophie appeared to be fully spent. I know for sure it charged it back up to 100% the first time but I’m not sure it was able to do so the second time. Just in terms of raw impression, it felt like the battery drain on the iPhone during recording was perfectly reasonable. At any rate, success!
I’m very happy with the results as “a record of the event”. Beyond that it’s a bit sloppy though. Some thoughts:
I’m disappointed that it seems to think the distance was 90km. I suppose there may just be some jitter in the process, and in particular perhaps at the rest stops, but I don’t see how this could add up to an extra 12km. Then again it was a 25 hour activity so maybe all those little errors just add up. (Plus there's almost certainly a bias towards overstating distances with such errors so it's unlikely they would trend towards canceling out over time.) It would be great if there were a way to adjust the total official distance for a Strava event after upload without trimming the path, though I confess I don't know how this would work. (A dream Strava feature request is “path correction mode”, for both distance and altitude, where it more or less sorts out where you went and corrects the sloppy captured data to match the reality based on known roads & trails. This is tricky to do right so I’m happy to just leave this as a long term wish for now.)
Because I’m not that familiar with the Strava app, I accidentally started the event in “bike” mode. I had noticed this option messing around the day before when I decided I was going to use the app, and switched it to “run” mode, but it apparently switched back to “bike” when I actually started recording. This appears to have at least 2 side-effects. 1) It uses auto-pause mode (configurable via a setting) & 2) it seems to do something different regarding how it collects samples. Don’t quote me on the last part, but it seemed like something changed when I flipped it over half-way through the event. (Happily this didn’t seem to confuse it or interrupt the activity in any way.) I’m probably missing something important but in the spirit of “less is more” in app design, I would greatly prefer that there be no such thing as “bike mode” or “run mode” for recording.
Strava does have a “hike” mode for activities, though this doesn’t seem to appear in the iPhone app, and anyway I’ve found the hike mode to be not particularly well thought-out. I decided pretty early on after moving to HK to just tag all my hikes (which often include some running) as runs in Strava. In HK there’s so much crazy vertical in various trails that even if we were running parts of this event we wouldn’t be running all of it. Setting them all as runs means they all fall into the same “pool” of activities for my own history and for comparison with other HK athletes.
On the “auto-pause" point, honestly I’ve never really understood “moving time” as a useful stand-in for event duration on Strava. It seems to be a feature requested & designed by people who don’t understand how reality works. OK, sure, if there’s a lazy lunch break during a long ride, maybe you want to carve that out of your activity time, but in general, if you start an activity at 9am and finish it at 3pm, guess what? That’s a 6 hour activity. Whatever breaks you took along the way helped you finish, you can’t just wish them away. I can see the value of knowing how much of that 6 hours was spent moving, but in my world that's a detail, not the headline.
An extremely fun quirk to this event (& the Wilson Trail it’s based on) is that it includes a short trip on the Hong Kong MTR (subway) to get across Victoria Harbor! I’ll set aside the obvious problem of having no GPS signal in the subway because the straight line between valid data points at the stations is good enough I think. This section is most definitely part of the event, deserves to be part of the GPS trace line, etc., but of course also should have a special flag to indicate that we weren’t walking/running that portion. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be a way in Strava to exclude just part of an activity from PRs and similar analysis other than splitting the activity into 2. Screw that! I want one big crazy long squiggly line! A “flag just this range” feature would be very useful here but this is clearly a rare situation, so it’s hard to say this is a big failing on their part. But as a result I now have some PRs for 100m / 200m etc that seem to be forever out of reach.
Another curious fact about this activity: I switched to a different pair of shoes at the half-way point. So Strava’s feature of keeping track of what shoes I used for a given activity comes up a bit short here. Again, hard to really fault them for it.
When I went to save the activity, I was in a location with no mobile data coverage. I expected it to say something reassuring like, “this activity will be synced later”. Instead it popped up a vague error message and the activity disappeared! For the life of me (in my post-ultra hike / sleep deprived state) I couldn’t find it again, but once I did get data coverage it synced it and all was well. Phew! (Also I thought I attached a photo to the event but that didn't seem to come through, maybe that part got dropped with the network error.)
Overall I’d rate this about a B- experience. I’m extremely happy to have a record of the event and the technology to make that possible is very impressive. There’s much room for improvement around the edges, in particular the total distance discrepancy, but it’s hard to say this was anything but a success. And perhaps most importantly given my current personality quirks: the process of recording didn’t detract from the event much if at all.
If I had my dream replacement for all of this, I currently imagine it would be something along the lines of a “do one job” wristband with start/stop, highly accurate position capture, and very long battery life. Leave everything else to the post-processing. I’m not even sure what I’m thinking of is practical with current generation GPS, but who knows, perhaps there’s a Kickstarter out there waiting to happen.
Oh, P.S.: How fun is the Strava Labs Flyby feature? Nice work guys!
NO COMMENTS