Dialed Podcast 347 - Strava Issues

Hey Strava, what gives?  What is going on at Strava and did they seem to take another misstep? Is Tadej Pogačar under paid?  We answer a listener question about cross bikes vs gravel bikes, and do another Patreon drawing.  Enjoy the podcast! 

Transcript

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Jake: [00:00:00] Hi, and welcome back to the dial podcast. I'm Jake von Duering here with Lance “Friggin’” Heppler. Lance “Friggin’” Heppler. Welcome 

Matt: to the show. What's up, your frigginess? Welcome to the show. 

Jake: How are you? Swell. 

Matt: Good. 

Jake: Yeah. To his right, Matt LeGrand.

Matt: What's up, ladies and gentlemen? You guys look punctual.

Lance: Matt was a full half hour late today. That's not too bad. He just got stuck in his own little world 

Matt: and tuned everything out. What's funny, it was like I got back and I'm like starting to get into work and I'm like, wait, I don't have anything where I'm supposed to be. Like, no, I'm good. Just like, we talked about this yesterday, 

Lance: Matt.

Lance: Yesterday that we were gonna record. 

Matt: Yeah, 

Lance: that's all it takes. You got too much on your plate, 

Matt: dude. I have way too much on my plate right now. I'm, uh, coaching every morning at like 5 in the morning. 

Jake: Hey Matt. Why don't you just make that your backpedal? How much does that go? 

Lance: Wait, wait. We are missing Sir Ian Gibson.

Lance: We are. He's pregnant. He tested positive. For [00:01:00] sexiness in COVID. That wasn't a pregnancy test you sent us a picture of? Now it makes a lot more sense. 

Matt: He sent the stick. He sent the picture of the stick. He sent 

Lance: the picture of the stick. And I said, congratulations. 

Matt: I 

Lance: thought he was in menopause, but I don't know.

Lance: Okay. Sorry, Matt. 

Matt: My backpedal, no COVID. Uh, yeah. Waking up every morning to coach swimming has been fun. Early, early, early morning. Are you getting 

Jake: in the pot water too? 

Matt: No, well actually I'm probably gonna get in the water on Monday cause I'm working with like a special needs kid and it's a lot of like the coordination and stuff is very tricky.

Matt: And so, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll get in the water on, on Monday and help a little bit. But most of the time I'm trying, trying on the deck, I've been trying to do all kinds of stuff. Like, uh, we did, uh, we like, we're like getting our face in the water. So I've been kind of getting wet every day, even though not, trying to, but it's been fun.

Matt: Um, have gotten on Zwift a couple of times, I think three, three times in the past week or so. All time record on Tuesday. Yeah. Tuesday. Yeah. [00:02:00] I've been trying to do those cause I think they're good except for the group went out fast this particular day. Yeah. It was hilly enough where I was like, I'm getting dropped early today, but I think I made a half an hour or something like that in the Tuesday before I made it 45 minutes or something like that.

Matt: Okay. I noticed, I 

Jake: noticed that like all of a sudden you were gone and then your whole thing just disappeared. I'm like, Oh, he gone. 

Matt: Sometimes I'm like, get on the, um, cause we have a discord when we talk about like we do our group rides and people are welcome to join us. Uh, but we get, you know, we get on this discord and you know, usually we'll chat or whatever and usually I'll chime in and I'll just be like, all right, see you guys later or whatever.

Matt: But I was like, yeah, it's fine. Because you guys, you hit a big hill and I was like, Gone. It's already go, you guys were already going fast enough that it was painful, so. I'm just not the athlete that I used to be. 

Jake: The prescription is three to four watts per kilogram for the climbs. And I think I looked down and saw people doing like four and a half to five.

Jake: I'm like, come on guys. I 

Matt: saw you at five at one point, but you were probably just trying to catch someone. I 

Jake: was just trying to get back 

Matt: on the group. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Anyway, that's too rich for my [00:03:00] blood. And then I folded my hand. Done. Uh, and then, um, let's see, I ran seven miles on Sunday, which was awesome.

Matt: Cause I ran like out with one group of people, like, uh, a guy that, you know, some, some guys that do kind of their own club coaching program or whatever. And a physical therapist, they were running together and I ran with them on the way out for haters trail on the way back. back. It was awesome. She was just out doing her run.

Matt: Oh, nice. So it's like a little date, a little date run. And the trails have been sloppy. I ran the trails this morning and they were just like, there's no getting around the puddles, you're just like slopping through it. Bomb Cyclone, baby. Bomb Cyclone. Which also makes for not great riding weather. 

Lance: Although I have ridden outside a couple of times.

Lance: Yes, 

Matt: backpedal for us. 

Lance: Um, I've ridden almost every day still. Did 

Matt: you go in the bombs when it was like super windy and crazy sideways wind? In rain and, and hail. Did you see any hail? No, I did see [00:04:00] hail, but I didn't ride in it. 

Jake: Graffel, I think is what it's actually called. Oh, that what we had. It was 

Lance: like sleet dish.

Jake: Yeah. Well, it's snow ish. I think it's called graffel. I'll, I'll double check here in just a second. But it's a cross between snow and hail. So it has the texture of snow, but it looks like a small, like almost like a corn kernel. A small corn kernel of hail. Yeah. But if you pick it up, it feels more like snow's.

Jake: Not that's hard. So 

Matt: Eskimos have 17 different words for snow. Are you, are you part Eskimo? Are you sure? Are you from California, or? The Great White Nord. 

Jake: No, Brad Miskinnis. He told me all about that. If you're from Pisces Northwest, you might know who he is, so. 

Lance: Um, on Saturday, I did go ride gravel for like three hours with a couple teammates with uh, hats on.

Lance: field and handle. I think I saw that. Yeah. We met up out in, uh, North Plains, um, and rode like a three hour route. It was, we didn't get rained on too bad. It was cold, but not terribly cold. Uh, yeah, that was, that was a great ride. We did some big, long [00:05:00] climbs and did some big, long descents and we rode some gravel and it was just a good time.

Lance: Um, thank you guys for, we invited a bunch of people to go, but it was like late notice. It was just the three of us. Yeah. Didn't invite me. Um, we did not. No, yes, we did. Nope. We didn't. Nope. Yes, we did. Sorry, I'd always said no anyway, but nope. Yeah, that's why we didn't invite you, suckwad. So, we And then that night, we all went to the high school play that, uh, Handel's daughter was performing in.

Matt: No way. Yes! Wait, was it at Camus High School? No. No. There's a high school play, I mean, there's high school plays at every high school, I assume. But, like, there's one going on there, too, so. 

Lance: Uh, this was Central Catholic High School. Okay. In, uh, in Portland. That's where his youngest daughter goes. And, uh, we, we went to that play.

Lance: The Hatfields and the Hannels and the Heplers. That's cool. Yeah, we went to dinner first, then we went to the play, and we watched the play. It was, it was a good time. How was the 

Matt: play? 

Lance: It was good. It was great. 

Matt: You have to say that, because you're on air. 

Lance: No, it was actually, it was fun. It's a high school play, you know, so, you know, when you know somebody [00:06:00] it's good.

Lance: So that made it fun. So that was cool. Um, other than that, this is daughter that cycles quite all, like all the time. It's not highly as off at college. She is 18, or she's 18 now, and so she's off in college, she's going to school in, uh, at the, um, University of, no, Oregon State University Bend Campus, so she's in Bend, Oregon.

Lance: She's part of the reason why you guys dropped on Tuesday night. 

Matt: I know, I was going to say, she was with, riding with us, right? Yeah. She's strong. She's strong. And she was like, I'm not putting up with this Matt character. Pretty much. Yeah. Okay, fair. 

Lance: Fair enough. Yeah She's her father's daughter. Yeah. Yeah, so they have another younger daughter who is still in high school.

Lance: So got it That's what we were doing. It was watching the rest of the week. I did write on Zwift a few times I've been doing some workouts. I've rode outside a couple times I did not manage to catch the super windy days cuz that was and if it's raining outside and it's under 45 degrees. I'm just gonna ride on Zwift.

Matt: And it was like [00:07:00] sideways. I mean it was really windy too. Yeah. 

Lance: It was a good day for Zwift. But, uh, when it has been raining I have been riding outside and taking some KOMs because screw you everybody. Mm hmm. 

Ian: That's what you do. 

Lance: Right on. That's it. Jake! Presenting your Royal Highness, Sir Ian Gibson. 

Ian: It's a 

Matt: tribute.

Matt: It's just a tribute. 

Jake: Do we need to backpedal for him at all? Is there anything that he's got going on? 

Lance: Uh, let's see. COVID. Ian, uh, yeah. What did he do this last? I have no idea what he did. 

Jake: Nothing. He just got back from the UK and he's been sick and missed the podcast last week. That's got COVID and he 

Lance: did not ride and lose there.

Lance: He was there visiting his mother. It's kind of his off season. He's trying to get gearing up for, uh, crank it back in. Yeah. All good. We miss you again. 

Jake: Yep. Get better soon. Um, Hey, real quick grapple G R a U P E L. Basically precipitation that forms when supercooled water droplets and is collected and freeze [00:08:00] on Basically falling snowflakes.

Jake: So it's like snowing snowflakes that have like this extra bit of stuff that kind of attaches to him But that's what it's called. It's I think they also call it like hominy or something like that. Sorry 

Lance: I got your grappling hominy, right? 

Jake: My backpedal nothing to report just Rodon's with a handful of times and how's it going?

Matt: Do you feel strong, decently strong or I'm all right. I'm not 

Jake: doing anything kind of crazy. I mean, the group rides probably about as spicy as I get in this week. I wasn't feeling well. I'm like, Oh crap. Am I getting sick? But I thought that in the morning, I thought for sure I wasn't going to even get on the train and I'm like, you know what, I feel okay.

Jake: I might as well just get on there and give the old 20 minute test and see if I feel good. I actually rounded out and felt pretty good. So did you ride, 

Matt: um, did you do group rides Tuesday and Thursday? 

Jake: I did not do Thursday. I was, that was last night I was at my daughter's volleyball game. So, 

Matt: okay. 

Jake: Yeah.

Matt: She's playing volleyball. 

Jake: She is. Yep. She's playing for the middle school. Nice. So, she won't play beyond this, even though she likes it a lot, and she's actually [00:09:00] pretty good at it. Volleyball's fun. But volleyball's at the same time as soccer in high school, and you have to pick and choose. Right. They will not let you play both, so.

Jake: Yep. Yep. Other than that, nothing special to report. Just, uh, doing my thing. Good times. Hooray. Good times. Hey, um. 

Lance: Champ Alley in sports. 

Jake: Is Champ here? 

Lance: Champ is here. Chaaant friggin 

Jake: Bailey. What's up Champ? 

Lance: Hey, hello guys. It is Chant Bailey. Uh, in the world of cycling, nothing happened. Champ out. And out. There really isn't anything happening.

Lance: Um, what happened? There is some cyclocross, all the cyclocross racing is going full gas in Belgium and in Canada and on the east coast. That's all happening, but nothing, there's really no big results to speak of. So, uh, there's really Nothing to talk about. Unless you have questions. Do you have questions, Jake?

Lance: Um, 

Jake: any transfer news? Anybody signed any new teams? [00:10:00] 

Lance: No, nothing new that what we knew beforehand. 

Jake: You know, we already talked about Pogacar getting his big, big contract. Pogacar got his big contract. I've 

Lance: actually seen a few articles saying that he's underpaid. 

Jake: Do you guys agree with that? 

Lance: Seriously? At like eight and a half million euro a year?

Lance: Yeah. Because of 

Jake: what he brings to the table? Correct. The eyeballs that he's putting on the sport, and just the viewership that they're getting out of it. And just the fact that he's a superhuman on the bike. Hopefully he's clean, but yeah. Hopefully clean, but he is freaking superhuman. That is true. I mean, he's, if you think about like, uh, Shohei Otani, You know, 70 million a year.

Jake: Yeah. That's absurd for a baseball player to get paid that much. But then you start to think about like, all right, what does he bring to the team and what is his worldwide? Did I 

Lance: watch a baseball game this year? Because of Otani? Yeah. Yes, I did. You did. 

Matt: And, and people like things cost what they cost for a reason, right?

Matt: Like. They're paying that money because of course this deal was actually very special if you look at it because he did a lot of it's all back in stuff. So 

Jake: California kind of gets the short end of that straw, 

Matt: but still, even though like the, the [00:11:00] price tags for these athletes are because they are worth it.

Matt: Like they're not going to pay someone if he wasn't worth it, they're not, they wouldn't pay it. Right. So just him alone, simple 

Jake: as that, his appeal in the Asian markets, I believe the Japanese, uh, media conglomerates are buying up a ton of like advertising with the Dodgers. And I think that it was, I'd have to go back and double check this, but the number that's in my head is something like 200 million.

Jake: just in that alone. Oh my gosh. And then the other thing that happens is as they traveled all the different ballparks, they're buying up all of the advertising space at those different ballparks so that, you know, they can basically be able to like, you know, channel into that. And a lot of those ballparks are leveraging.

Jake: He's like, yeah, we'll let you do that, but you have to buy this much more. So there's a lot of people jumping on that bandwagon. The amount of money that he is generating is astronomical, but at the same time. It's kind of worth it for him because they're making that much more money. And they've got a superhuman playing baseball that, you know, this coming season will be playing both ways again.

Jake: Crazy. So does [00:12:00] Taddei Pogacar deserve to get paid more than his 8 million euros a year? 

Matt: Or it's supposed to be 50 million over six years. Yep. It's a huge deal. 

Lance: I, and that's, that's just his contract with them. Does he have, do they have other separate sponsorship deals? A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. They have to, there's certain ones that are part of the team that you can't do, but then they can have separate spots, personal.

Lance: Well, Red Bull's 

Jake: the perfect example that Red Bull doesn't sponsor Yumbo Visma or Lisa bike, whatever they're called, but he's getting money from Red Bull. Yes. So I'm sure today being the a number one guy on the plan, I wouldn't, yeah, I don't know. I think that he can probably, you can definitely make a case that he's worth more than that.

Jake: But, you know, that's all he's going to get. And he's happy with that. Then UAE's happy as a clam because they've got the best ride in the world. And they're probably making a ton more money just because he's on the team. Not that they need it, but 

Matt: maybe they do. Yeah, I think, the thing that's interesting to me is you have a guy [00:13:00] who could easily crash and be done, you know.

Matt: Crash isn't cycling, gosh. Well, two years 

Lance: ago, he crashes, breaks his wrist, and he was pretty human that year. 

Matt: He was pretty human that year. But even without that, let's be honest, like, Jonas Vingegaard, uh, healthy, healthy, healthy. There's a great chance that Pochos not gonna win the tour toward France.

Lance: Possibly. 

Matt: Yep. I mean, I mean, if you want, if Jonas is healthy 

Lance: and it's, it's, and he has a decent team around him again, which he could, 

Matt: it's ar he's arguably the, the better athlete of the two in some ways. 

Jake: Another thing to think about, it's to, it's, it's, it's, wow. 

Matt: It's hard to argue that, but I might bet I might back that a little bit, but.

Matt: I will say that like, he's, he's beat Pogacha twice. He has. Yeah. And, and once when they were both healthy and ready to go. Well, here's another thing 

Jake: too, that's still when Pogacha was still having his coming out party, we knew he was good, we just didn't know how good he was. So he's still having his coming out party, we, we knew, we know who he [00:14:00] is now.

Jake: Here's, and this is kind of what I was going to say, is like, when you've got a Pogacha on your team, you've got people that want to ride with him. Now you've got to have the right people because they have to know that they're not going to be the man. But are you willing to go be the Lieutenant and get paid that much more money?

Jake: Probably. I heard a story. 

Lance: I heard a story this morning that every, every writer that was on the tour to France team were paid over a million Euro a year just to come there and support him. Yeah. So if you think about it, so if you're, if you're the scrub, you know, racer number eight, and your job is just to pull in the flats.

Lance: Yeah. You still got paid a million Euro a year. Yeah. Worth it. Totally worth 

Jake: it. So if you think about it too, like just having him on your team and having a couple other superstars surrounded by him is going to make you that much more better, that much more marketable. So they're able to go out and get more sponsorship dollars to bring in more people, to be even better people.

Jake: And like, you've got, um, uh, who was it that was supporting him? Um, Yates, he's a GC kind of guy, but he's come on to support him and they're able to pay him to do that. And [00:15:00] he's like, I'll gladly do that because you're paying me extremely handsome. How many more people can you do? Because you brought that much more money in effective.

Jake: You're effectively having yourself build up a super team here. You've got deeper pockets to make yourself that much more prominent and that much more staying power. So, I mean, but this is also 

Matt: professional cycling and egos are real. And all of these guys want to crack at being the re the dude. Yeah. Well, the one 

Jake: thing that's going to check a big ego is a big paycheck.

Jake: You got to know that. And even if it's just for a couple of years to go in and ride. And knowing that you might have a chance in a stage race or a race or something like that, that he's not going to be at that to be the man. Yeah. You're going to go get your money so they can build a super team around him because of his allure.

Lance: I actually, there was a story that came out recently too, where Pogacha was asked. Would you want to win all three Grand Tours in a year? Yep, and hit the main reason he didn't want to do it is his answer was I have teammates that I want to keep happy Another reason why you want that guy [00:16:00] on your team?

Lance: Yes, but Lance Armstrong say 

Jake: that 

Lance: no He just said he goes I don't want to win all three I want to give my teammates a chance to possibly win a Grand Tour So I I don't I need their help in the others I need to give that up for another race, which was cool to hear 

Jake: Yeah Anyway, they can build this incredible team because there's no salary cap for cycling teams.

Jake: And if you've got, you know, teams that are running on a budget of like eight to 10 million a year, and then all of a sudden you get this other team that's able to, I don't say run on 20 million a year because they've got all these superstars that draw on even more money. I don't know. It is that good for the sport?

Jake: Is that good? Is that, 

Matt: I mean, uh, this is not new, right? This is, this has been the case for other teams in the past and it's very interesting. Yeah. Sky. Yeah. Sky is definitely like the classic example. Um, but even more recent than that, there's been teams that have just been extremely dominant, but they somehow get broken up because I think maybe it's the allure of, of having your own [00:17:00] group, uh, Roglic, right?

Matt: Roglic leaving, uh, 

Lance: Vizma and going to Red Bull. Yeah. That's a perfect example of like, 

Jake: you know, somebody that's got it in him. He doesn't have too many more years to go do it. He wants to be the man. He's not going to be the man on that team, so 

Matt: What about Adam Yates? Like, he wants to be the man, probably, and he's not going to be the man on that team.

Matt: Exact same phrasing. He 

Jake: knows that he's at a certain part of his career where he wants to be the man, but he can't be the man because he doesn't have, but he can definitely go out there and he can be a huge asset to somebody. Yeah. As a lieutenant. 

Matt: Hmm. I don't know. 

Jake: Just food for thought. 

Matt: Good, good question.

Matt: Good question. Good hot seat question. 

Jake: For sure. Anything else there? Champaroo? Nope. Champ out. out. Cool. Hey, um, we kind of talked about this a little bit last week. Uh, we've got the new podcast platform that we're running and we've got some new little bells and whistles that we can use with this, uh, little dog and pony show that we got running on here.

Jake: One of those things is called fan mail. So it's kind of neat because it's actually embedded into all the different [00:18:00] players. I don't know if you guys picked up on that or you saw that. It said, 

Lance: send us a text on right on the Apple podcast. So 

Jake: you've got that. We've got transcripts that we can build into the podcast.

Jake: Now there are chapter markers. So if you don't want to listen to us here and blabber on about all the backpedal stuff and you want to get straight to business, you can click in there and it'll give you a chapter marker. We can go right to what it is we're talking. Maybe you want to come back and listen to that later.

Jake: You can click on that button, go back. It's just kind of neat. So it's just making the user experience a little bit better. It's a touch more work, but I don't mind doing it if it's going to make a better user experience. So, but the one thing is the, um, the fan mail and without even really talking about it, it's already been used.

Jake: So we have our first one coming through. Um, just a quick bit though, on how the fan mail works. So when you see that in your player, whether it be through Spotify or Apple, podcast or whatever platform you're listening to it, you can click on that. You can actually send us a text. We do not see your text, your phone number.

Jake: We do see like the last four digits of your phone number. So we can kind of know if it's the same person sitting as the same text and it shows us [00:19:00] where you're texting us from. So we can see that information. Like what city or state? Yeah. So the one that we had come through was from Los Angeles, California.

Jake: And we can't text them back. So it's a one way street. So you can send us the information. And the only way that we can get back to you is to talk about it on the podcast. So guess what guys, we've got a new segment called fan mail, fan mail. Yeah. 

Lance: We need to come up with a better name for that bumper music for fan mail.

Lance: Jay, we 

Matt: need bumper music. We need a different name that has some sort of bicycle reference besides fan mail. 

Jake: Okay. Well, what's that going to be then? 

Matt: Um, I don't know. Let's see. We've got back pedaling. We've got, we need some by your doubts, hand up. Um, something, something dirty and grimy like, uh, chain, chain mail.

Matt: Chain mail? Chain mail? Yeah. I don't know. Well, come back to us. We're riffing here. Sometimes we nail stuff right off the top of our heads. A lot of times we don't. This time we [00:20:00] did not. This time we failed. Oh. 

Jake: Okay, so. This has been. 

Lance: So the placeholder name at the moment is fan mail. And that's only 

Jake: because that's what it's called.

Jake: No, does it say fan mail or does it say sinister text? I don't know. It's a sinister text. Text the jackals, I don't know, something like that. Anyway, so the, the first one that came through and again, before we read this to anybody wants to send us a message, just click on there, shoot us a message. And yeah, we can't get back to you, but we can talk to you back on the top podcast and we'll try and get to as many of them as we possibly can.

Jake: So take advantage of that. So, um, from. The listener in Los Angeles, California, uh, pretty much had a question and it was, you guys mentioned the gravel bike being the one bike, if you had to choose. So if we had like just one bike that we could have, that would be it. Right. So he is saying, um, or asking, um, that, but a cross bike would definitely not be that one.

Jake: His question is if you have, if you could have one bike, wanted to do some [00:21:00] gravel racing and, um, also wanted to try a cross race or two, what would you look for in geometry, bottom bracket height. Wheelbase and what does the true quiver killer for the Weekend Warrior look like who that is a loaded question big big question It's a big big question.

Jake: So first and foremost, we kind of talked about the difference between a gravel bike and a cross bike Do you want to go over that again real quick? Just give them the like the quick 

Lance: The, the, the biggest difference is the head tube angle on your, on your front wheel. Mm-Hmm. where? Mm-Hmm. What your head tube angle is on, on cyclocross bikes.

Lance: It's a steeper head tube angle, which means the forks closer to the, the fork. Yeah. Your front wheel is closer to the, your bottom bracket, and that's usually between 72 and 73 degrees. Mm-Hmm. . On a gravel bike, it's usually between 70 and 71 degrees. More slack. So it's more slack. So your wheels are farther apart.

Lance: Correct. Making them farther apart makes it more stable for For, for speed, for going [00:22:00] faster distance, but slower responding on tight corners. Correct. So, a cross bike will turn quicker, um, but a gravel bike will go faster in longer, straighter sections. That's a lot more stable too. Yeah, a lot more stable.

Lance: So it's, it's kind of like driving a bus compared to driving a sports car. That's how I feel about it. When I, when I ride the two, 

Matt: that's a good analogy. 

Lance: Cyclocross is like driving a sports car. It's it's steep, sharp, you know, quick corners and it responds quickly. And a gravel bikes, like driving a bus, I'd say it's 

Jake: a little bit more like a big full size truck, right?

Jake: Okay. Maybe not really a bus bus be more like a, I don't know, cargo bike or something like that. But anyway, it's just 

Lance: funny when I've switched. Like, I used to keep a gravel bike in the pit in cyclocross, and when I switched to it, I like, the first corner I come to, I blow through the tape. You're like, I'm like, whoa, this isn't going, I'm not making this corner so fast.

Lance: So that's, that's the biggest difference. Um, my thought on the [00:23:00] thing, it would be, You'd be more beneficial to own a gravel bike because it, it would check more boxes. You can still race a gravel bike in a cyclocross race. We know a lot of people that do that. Yes. 

Jake: I mean, so many manufacturers stopped making cyclocross bikes strictly to start putting their efforts towards making gravel bikes, because that's what the industry is demanding right now.

Jake: And there's just not as much demand for cyclocross. Even though it's still a great sport. Yes. 

Lance: And if you have a gravel bike already, and you're only doing three or four or five cyclocross races a year, man, I would just raise the gravel bike or race your mountain bike. If you have one, that's really not that big a deal either.

Lance: Um, however, if you're doing 20 or 25 races a year, it might be beneficial to have a cyclocross specific bike, but you can find one, you know, in the Cheaper on the used market, or if you buy yourself a brand new, like race cyclocross bike, that's going to cost you 5k, [00:24:00] 10k for another bike. Yep. So it just depends on how deep your pockets are and what kind of racing you want to do.

Lance: Yep. One 

Jake: other difference between the two is going to be your bottom bracket height. So the bottom bracket on the gravel bike is going to be lower to the ground. Not like dramatically lower, but it's going to be relatively lower because of the fact that you're trying to like stabilize everything. You're trying to create a stable environment for high speeds, for descending down long gravel roads and making it more comfortable.

Jake: Whereas the gravel bike, again, it's going to be higher. Everything's going to be kind of cross bike, sorry, cycle, cross bikers be higher and everything's gonna be tucked in a little bit. And it just helps you get over obstacles. It helps you probably shoulder the bike maybe a little bit better. Maybe, I don't know, but 

Lance: anyway.

Lance: Yeah, usually that higher bottom bracket height really comes into effect when you're bunny hopping, bunny hopping barriers. Um, In our cyclocross races, we had a race series that would have short barriers at every race. So the big barriers, only three or four people could bunny hop those. The short barriers, which were like half the height of a regular barrier.

Lance: Um, [00:25:00] like 70 percent of the people were bunny hopping because it was just, it was just easier. He just had to hit him at the right speed. And you can tell people who were rolling through and weren't bunny hopping. We're just trying to ride over and we're on. Gravel bikes, because their chain ring was just slamming into the barrier.

Lance: If they weren't actually bunny hopping, they were trying to front wheel, rear wheel it like slowly, your chain ring just drills it. You can see that. 

Jake: So if you could only have one, are you still going to stick with the gravel bike? 

Lance: I'd still stick with the gravel bike. 

Jake: How about you Matt for all of your cross racing?

Jake: You can be okay with your gravel bike? I do 

Matt: cross race a lot. Um, yeah, gravel for sure. Just because, yeah, I think you're, you know, that's a lot of what we do is we go ride these bikes for fun and enjoyment. We take them out and cyclocross racing is awesome, but that's just a couple of times that you're going to be able to do that.

Matt: I mean, you might have this wonderful opportunity to do cyclocross practice with a team, in which case you're going to [00:26:00] get on that bike and you're going to use it. And then you're going to use it for races, probably in the fall each year. Whereas gravel bikes, I feel like you could, you could definitely do a practice and you could probably do a races with that bike as well.

Matt: But then year round, you can go out and find gravel stuff to work on. So I think it's a, I think it's a better option for people, 

Jake: better investment. Um, just kind of comparing the two, going back to the primary thing, being that head to being on, being able to get through tight corners a lot faster. Faster, a hundred percent agree with you, but it's not like, it's like, you're going to be five seconds slower per corner.

Jake: I mean, it's going to be a fraction of a second, probably. Yes. But the problem is with the cyclocross races, there are a lot of corners and that adds up over the course of time. However, it depends on the course too, because there's probably sections in that cyclocross race that might benefit a gravel bike a little bit more like a, maybe a long, steep descent or something like that, or a long flat straightaway where you want to get after it a little bit more.

Jake: That could be something that you can mitigate some of that, but for your classic, traditional cyclocross race, you're still going to be losing a tiny bit of time. So do your reps get strong, get [00:27:00] faster, make up for it. Agreed. 

Lance: Good two cents there. I hope that answered your question. Sweet. I, I have a. A cyclocross race specific bike, but that's because I do 25 cyclocross races a year and I paid five grand for that bike five years ago.

Lance: Correct. But it's still relevant. It's still working. It don't need to replace it yet. It's still light and fast. The wheels are good. So I hold on to that. Is Giant still making a dedicated cross bike? That's a good question. I, I don't know. 

Jake: I haven't checked in a while. Yeah. So interesting. I know that like, you know, yeah.

Jake: Some of the brands that we work with, like, um, Santa Cruz, they used to have the stigmata and that was their cyclocross bike. And that has morphed over the course of time into now a gravel bike. So the geometry is completely different. Uh, BMC used to make the cross machine. They completely discontinued that and they only have their gravel bikes now.

Jake: Um, what other, I think the Cannondale, the super six, I think it was the cross bike. Now they still have [00:28:00] something that's still. Cross adjacent or close to it, but it's got some gravel characteristics to it. And I think that's kind of how they kind of sell it, but you can still use it for both. It just feels like a lot of people are getting away from it.

Jake: So when you go out to race. And a lot of people that are going to be newer to the sport, chances are, they're probably going to be on a gravel bike, right? Yep. Yep. So that number is growing giant does still sell the 

Lance: TCX advanced pro. Okay, cool. Which is the bike I race. It's the same model from, but did you 

Matt: notice that they also category the category when they lump these together?

Matt: It's like. Road bike, mountain bike, and then it's gravel and cyclocross. They're kind of lumped together, so it's interesting. We're in an interesting time in the bike industry where it's hard to separate those two. 

Jake: Yeah. Hey guys, hot take. Hot take. Strava's pissing off the world again. Way to 

Lance: go, way to go Strava.

Lance: Yeah, there's been a whole lot of drama this last week, uh, with, uh, Strava. They have changed some things with their user [00:29:00] agreement and their API. 

Jake: What do you think? What do you think? Where are they headed? 

Matt: They're on the highway. I'm not sure where. Where's that highway headed? Where's this highway going?

Lance: The highway to heaven, . 

Matt: Not what I heard. I know. That's not how 

Lance: that song goes. 

Jake: There are a lot of pissed off people at Strava right 

Lance: now. There are. And you know, no. A lot of pissed off people in the world because of Strava. Right. Not pissed off people at Strava. Okay. Do you think there's pissed off people at Strava?

Lance: Maybe. I don't think they care 

Matt: actually. I think they're pissed. I think they're like, Ooh, this blew up in our face. . 

Lance: I guess they could be. 'cause it's been all over it. They're pissed. I mean, if you're in the algorithm like we are, it's on, it's, there's like five different videos on my, on my YouTube. 

Jake: No joke, within like an hour, I was getting all these pings from Reddit, I was getting these things popping up in my Google feed for, um, like just news stories.

Jake: YouTube's sending me things that, you know, Raymaker just put out this big thing, and so we should have had 

Matt: him on this podcast Give him a call.[00:30:00] 

Jake: Anyhow, um, they came out and they have effectively kind of disconnected themselves from just about everybody that's been utilizing their API. And it's like, all right, well, how can we still use this? Now, one of the things is like, they are giving people the chance to kind of change some things, but at the end of the day, I mean, what value add is there for people to still be using their API if they've pretty much governed just about everything that you have to do, like they throttled your ability to really utilize everything that they're doing with respect to the information that you can pull from their database and share.

Jake: Whether it be. With your coach or how your coach uses their, your information on different platforms and how they can gather that stuff. And it just, there's a plethora of things that they just kind of turned off. Yeah. What's your take? 

Lance: You know, it seems like they're, they're just. Cutting out a lot of people who rely on sharing that API, all these smaller fitness apps or coaching apps, where your, your, your Strava [00:31:00] data is pushed to another app so that they can analyze your data and give you feedback if, like, if you're using a, Coach for something.

Lance: Yeah, so any company that uses Strava to push their data to somebody else Strava has cut that off. Sure So there might be 50 or a hundred different fitness apps out there that rely on Strava to send the data to their customers Oh, 

Jake: you know what? I didn't even think about this one. I use this, um, granted I haven't been on Strava a ton of late just because I've been doing mostly stuff on Zwift, but there's, um, a Chrome extension called Strava Sauce, I think it is?

Jake: Yeah, yeah, I use it 

Matt: too. That's a great one. 

Jake: Fantastic. Is that going to be something that's going to get throttled as well? 

Matt: I don't, mmm, I don't, see, I have this feeling that the way that that Hold on. You hear that? What you doing? Yeah. That's not mine. Is that mine? Yeah. Yeah. That's my background music whenever I say something really poignant.

Jake: Okay. Nice. What are you 

Matt: calling me? No, I was texting Ray to see if he would like hop on the podcast with us, but, uh, [00:32:00] It's like 2 a. m. in Amsterdam. He's in Amsterdam right now, yeah. Uh, but he's always like, this is when he definitely works at this hour. He's so weird. What was I talking about? Something poignant.

Matt: I don't remember. 

Jake: Strava sauce. 

Matt: Yeah. So I think the way that that works is it's, it's a browser extension. So it's looking at the code on the website itself. So there's not necessarily an API to look at that data and then reinterpret it slightly different or give you more information. So that wouldn't necessarily go through the API.

Matt: It could, however, use the API. Um, Strava would probably say, you're not allowed to look at our website code and, and do that. That would be against their terms of service. Whereas using their API is within their terms of service. So my guess is, so I always thought that that Strava sauce plugin. didn't, didn't use their API.

Matt: I just thought that it was kind of like this illegal thing that they did. And, and right, like some, it's like one developer probably like making this thing, it's like a Chrome extension. It's awesome. If [00:33:00] you guys want to check it out, but they could be using the API to kind of pull in more data. I have no idea how, how they do it, but, um, if they're using the API, then absolutely that would be affected by this.

Matt: Uh, there was this recent, like since this whole kerfuffle, you know, There's been like the CEO of Strava came back on and he said, Hey, Hey, Hey, um, we think that this is only going to affect 0. 1 percent of the apps that are out there. Um, so they're probably changed some of these terms of surrogate service to target specific things that they kind of felt like, Hey, this is, this is, you're playing in our wheelhouse and we don't want you guys to do this.

Matt: But the way that they did it with this like sweeping hammer of changing their terms of service technically affects Everybody that uses their API so 

Jake: and they really put people in a bind too. They gave them 30 days to change everything Yeah, and this is us going through two holidays Thanksgiving and Christmas in that same time period and that's the time of year Where the cycling industry or people that work in [00:34:00] this industry, they kind of take the time The month off of December.

Jake: So as 

Matt: of like November 11th, so November 11th, plus 30 days, not a lot of time there. So, uh, I mean, it's, it's going to be pretty tricky for people because they don't want to get, um, in trouble for using the API incorrectly. Um, it's going to shut down some small apps for sure. Uh, and I think it's going to piss off a percentage of Strava users.

Matt: Some of those users will turn off their premium account. But I still think that, you know, we're talking about a small group of people making big waves. 

Jake: Gotcha. Well, let's, let's dig into Strava real quick. Just our personal experiences. What is it that you use Strava for? What, what is, what makes Strava be something that you're like, I love this app?

Jake: What is it that you love about Strava? I'm 

Lance: a professional Strava er. You are so pro. People ask me what I do for a job and I say Strava. That's what I do. No, I don't work for Strava. Um, [00:35:00] I love the leaderboards. Clearly, that is part of my, you know, megalomaniac um, personality where I like to win at things and I like to be competitive.

Lance: And so I love being on the Strava leaderboards or seeing a segment and then going after it. Sure. So, um, that part of me That's one of the things I love most about it. The second thing I love most is I get to see all my friends. Mhmm. What they're doing as well, where they're training, what they're doing. I might have a friend I'm, Ian might do a ride in England And he does it enough that I want to go do that loop that he's doing and then save the route and I save the route And at some point I go do it.

Lance: Doing the white rim Uh, trail in, uh, Canyonlands National Park, you know, I saw five or six friends do it and I saw their pictures and what they did and so that made it on my list of things I wanted to go ride some days. So it's a good inspiration for you. So it's an inspiration for me as well. Okay. It's also motivating because [00:36:00] You know, I follow several of my frenemies that I, that I compete with and I see what kind of training they're doing the winter and I'm like, Oh, freaking a, I got to get out on my bike.

Lance: It's got a motivational 

Jake: undertone 

Lance: to it as well. Okay. Got it. And the, uh, and the, the, the community aspect of it, the, yes, the social social part of it. Yeah. You know, I can, I can. I can like other people's rides. I can comment on other people's rides. I can share some photos or videos of the rides that I take.

Lance: So 

Matt: in the two of you guys have said this many times on this podcast, you guys wouldn't know each other if it wasn't for Strava correct. Yeah. Yeah. The, the app is clearly the best social athletic network that, that I can, that I personally use. Right. So, you know, there's all kinds of social networks. You have Facebook, you have Instagram, all these different things.

Matt: But this one is really fantastic because it's, it's very athletic specific. You can look at the pace, the power, the, all the athletic [00:37:00] data that you have, but the routes and what people are doing. And then you kind of also have pictures associated with that. It is fantastic. It's a fantastic social network in, in some ways.

Jake: So with respect to being a social network, How, how many times did you guys run across stuff during this last political cycle that people were posting political stuff on there and getting into arguments and fights? None, zero, zero. That's fantastic. There's nothing political. 

Lance: And I unfollowed maybe a dozen friends on other apps that I was just, I didn't want to see any more political crap.

Matt: Facebook was the one, right? And it's like, Facebook is so bad about all of that stuff. And it's. It's like where people go to just bitch about stuff. And I'm like, Oh yeah, I'm so glad I never, I never open up Facebook. I post things there, but I don't go there. And it's bad because then I'm not, I'm not follow, like I'm not picking up on any of the followup of the things that I post, but I'm okay with it because you hop on there and [00:38:00] first of all, it's a time suck.

Matt: Second of all, there's not a lot of like positivity there. Yeah. 

Jake: Well, the other thing that I hate about Facebook that you don't find on Strava is like all of the ads, the sponsored ads. Like I'm not getting solicited to 24 seven. Now you'll see the random thing that comes through every once in a while, but I'm super surprised that they haven't worked that into their whole algorithm or an algorithm, I guess that wouldn't be part of the algorithm, but their whole like platform to have these paid ads where people are trying to sell you stuff on there.

Matt: Strava, Strava could do that. Yeah. They should. That's what I'm saying, but they haven't done it yet. It's not a bad thing that they, I don't, I mean, so many people are using this free platform. I'm on free currently. And if there were ads, I would be like, this makes sense. You have to pay for this platform.

Matt: Right? Well, 

Jake: if they're not selling you ads, then you are, you are the platform. Yeah. The product and your information's being used. And that, that leads me to my question here is 

Matt: like, 

Jake: what are they setting themselves up to do here? What, how, why are they turning off the API? Why are they like, what are they going to be doing with you?

Jake: [00:39:00] Cause you have to be some sort of value add to them. If you're not paying for their product and they're not selling you or trying to sell you like, you know, these sponsored ads. What are they trying to do now to leverage the platform to make the money that they need to be making? I think 

Matt: this really comes down to like, if you're not paying for the premium platform, which I know it's a large percentage of the people that are, I'm guessing, what do you think it is?

Matt: It's probably like 10 percent of the people or less are playing, paying for the premium edition of it. I'm guessing it's very small. 

Jake: I would say it's a little bit higher than that, but I could be talking 

Matt: about like active users or, but I bet you, it's very, very small because yeah, that, that would be interesting.

Matt: I bet it's less than 10%. I would guess really, really low, like less than 5 percent actually. But I'm 

Jake: not sure if I answered what you were thinking, the direction we were going, but what you thought. I 

Matt: was thinking that like. When if not right then what are they getting out of me, right? Like I'm not looking at ads I'm you know But what they are getting and I think what probably piss a lot of people off they get all of my data [00:40:00] All of every run I do every picture I post every comment every social connection that I have Yep, they own all of that and I think this is what people probably have a problem with they think this is my data That I'm giving to Strava And yeah, you are, but once it's over in their hands, they're going to say like, yeah, we own this data.

Matt: And then when they flip around and they're going to say like, through our API, we will share some of our data. Granted, we think it's our, we think it's our own data, but it's really Strava's data. They're saying we will share some of our data. Now, when we see people doing really cool stuff with that, we're going to be like, Oh, we want to do that really cool thing.

Matt: We want to, we want to make sure that this data that we own isn't being taken and taken away from us and being like repackaged and reused in a certain way that we don't agree with. So I think it's that whole, like who owns the data thing that every major organization that is a social media group that comes in, they want to own the data.

Matt: They don't want to own any of the responsibility for having that data. You have some [00:41:00] hate speech on Facebook or Strava or whatever. Facebook's like, that wasn't us. We don't own that data. But then you're like, well, then I should be able to do whatever I want to with the data that I posted here. No, no, no, no, no, no.

Matt: We own that data. So it's kind of like they want both sides of the coin. They want both sides of the coin. They want the positives of both pieces. But 

Lance: so what's the end game here? Why, why make a sweeping change like this? Well, 

Matt: because they want to have their own AI, like we we've already seen like their, Dipping their toes into their AI system, which is by the way call it 

Lance: crap.

Lance: I figured out a way to turn that off Are you there is you somebody? One of my Instagram followers posted a story about how to turn it off. Oh, so there is, there is a way to turn that off. Okay. Yeah. This, I mean, I don't 

Matt: use 

Lance: it at all. I never 

Matt: click on it. And I think it's, before we jump 

Jake: into like what, what they're doing with this, um, you were wrong about the percentage of users.

Jake: Oh, and I was, I was really wrong. It's only 2%. 

Matt: 2% what? 2% of users are premium subscribers? 2%. I would've guessed [00:42:00] less than that Even. I said less than 10 and then I said less than five, but yeah, it's 

Jake: the app has over a hundred million athletes on the app. 2 percent of them are premium users and so it derives 90 percent of its income from that little general piece.

Jake: I wonder 

Matt: though how many people are active users versus I signed up for Strava at one point and I have like a dead account floating out there somewhere. So they're, I don't know, they're active users, like people posting, you know, If they posted in the past three weeks, you could be like, those are active users versus these just like kind of zombie accounts.

Matt: That'd be my question about that too. But anyway, that's just diving into the weeds of like premium stuff, but yeah. So 

Jake: anyway, so that's still a relatively small percent, but it's a lot bigger than like, say, uh, like Strava or not Strava. I'm sorry. Um, Twitter X, I think that they said that it's like, 0. 005 percent of Twitter accounts are paying for the Twitter blue, which is effectively the X with the little check mark next to it.

Jake: So for them to be at 2 [00:43:00] percent for their people to pay, that's good. And there are some value adds to being a paying customer. Um, you definitely have, you know, there's a value proposition there that it's good, it could be better, but you know, they have raised the price in the past year and change or two or 

Lance: whatever.

Lance: Okay. So that means out of a hundred million subscribers, 2 million are premium subscribers. And they're paying 12 bucks a month for that. So they're pulling in 24 million a month to, to run Strava. Good math. Yeah. Well, that simple math, I think the big brain on Brad. 

Matt: So you're Strava CEO, right? And Jake and I are on your platform or whatever.

Matt: I have like my own little app that does really cool stuff with AI as far as like looking at your training programs and making recommendations. Right. So you're Strava. Yeah, you see this. Here's this guy. He's using your API. He's using your data to do some cool stuff. And you also are trying to build an AI piece to yours.

Matt: Now, Jake clicks on yours and it says you need to be a premium member to [00:44:00] use this feature. He comes over, he clicks on mine and you don't. You don't, 

Lance: so what do you do? I, I want to capture more of the coaching market. People are willing to pay for coaching. I want the coaching market, so I'll just make it so that my data doesn't get shared to a coaching app because I want to offer my own coaching services.

Lance: You're trying 

Matt: to sell, you're trying to sell that premium service, right? And if I'm over here, like taking the, taking a piece of the pie, you're going to be like, Hey, 

Lance: we got to stop that. Right. And if we're going to add, Oh. So we have two million premium subscribers, but now there's a hundred or, or there's a million that want coaching services.

Lance: And to get that, they're going to want, they're going to have to upgrade to premium service. That's another 12 million dollars a month. Right. Yeah. It's another 12 million a month. If they convert some of those non premium to premium subscribers. [00:45:00] Holy crap, there's some big money at stake here, which makes which which which makes me It doesn't surprise me that they're trying to bully people.

Matt: Well, this'll blow over too, that's the best, well, maybe it's the worst part where it's like, you're gonna lose a couple users, they're gonna whine and complain about their app that they love, not being able to use it or whatever, and three months from now we're gonna be talking about how great Strava is again, and yeah, they're gonna be annoying because they're gonna be trying to sell me on the next greatest thing, or maybe their AI will get better, and you guys will be like, hey, this thing's turning out to be pretty cool.

Matt: So am I going to 

Lance: quit Strava? Because are you going to quit 

Matt: Strava? No. Are you going to quit Strava? No. Premium? No, not unless something else better comes up. I'm not. 

Jake: So a couple of things is like, when you get into a situation like this and you're kind of like the, the only game in town that's really doing what you're doing, that's prime for somebody else to come in and say, Hey, we're doing the same thing.

Jake: We can do it better. Yeah. We can do it cheaper. 

Matt: Yeah. It's really hard though, but oh my gosh, because [00:46:00] Strava does so much in you. So social networks are the worst because if you don't have the social effect of having people, what's the best features in the world? 

Jake: High end programmer app developer. Let's let's call him Matt.

Jake: Let's say he 

Matt: builds something better than Strava. Yeah, here's what's stopping. 

Jake: Jump on board with like, uh, Matt, my writer, whatever it is. And then you ride with GPS. That's what I meant to say. You marry those two things together. I mean, granted. Right. With GPS still, it's costing about the same amount of Strava per year.

Jake: It's about 80 

Lance: bucks a year. That's about what the premium account works out to as 

Jake: well. If you pay for it on the year plan, you know, what's to say that you can't come in there and create a better platform and drop more people in and then maybe drop that price down a little bit. 

Matt: No, one's going to come to my social network if no one else is there.

Matt: Right. So for me to even build, for me to even get to like a million users. For a free platform. I have a better chance of like shooting a basketball from right here into your basketball goal. Yeah, where's your basketball goal? [00:47:00] I don't have one exactly exactly right like there's like zero chance. So yeah, the thing is is like to get who this is Well, that's just So to get to get this social network thing off off the floor like There was a million Facebooks that were like trying to make it happen all at the same time and one of them came out and ended up dominating, right?

Matt: It's like, these social networks are so hard and once you have the ball rolling, it's like, well, then you have the ball rolling, it's moving, things are working, it's just takes forever for things to take off. And all of these companies, there's, I get like emails every single day from some company that's got this Strava killer or Zwift killer or um, all these different platforms, but guess what?

Matt: It's like, well, you don't have the people. And it gets really hard if you don't have the people, even if you have a great product and you're giving it away and you can only do that for so long. I don't know. 

Lance: Like Indie Velo, um, trying to compete with Zwift. It's hard. And now it's been bought by Training Peaks and Training Peaks is going to make it a subscription model instead of a free model.

Lance: [00:48:00] And what would be the draw for me to go to IndieVelo over Swift, other than the parameters and metrics might be better on IndieVelo or TrainingPeaks. It's harder to cheat on IndieVelo. 

Matt: Yes. There's lots 

Lance: of great things. But, nobody's on it. No peoples. Yep. 

Matt: You don't use it. Right. It's gonna be 

Lance: free for you.

Lance: I wanna ride with my friends or I wanna ride with other people. I'll stay on Zwift. 

Jake: Yeah. But my point is if there's ever a time for something to kind of step up and start to do something, it would be ish now. Yeah. So I 

Matt: agree. Sort of, I think the numbers don't, 

Jake: the likelihood of happening, probably very slim and none, unless you have someone like Facebook say, or Apple say like, we want to start a social network.

Jake: We've got people that's going to be in this fitness realm. Maybe you want to do something like that. And that, that, that's one thing. But. My other question is like, all right, what's really going on? Like, do you, yes, they want to make more money. They're a company, they're a for profit company. Who knows what their bottom line is, who knows what they're making and whatnot.

Jake: It's a private company, but don't know the numbers. [00:49:00] Exactly. So maybe that's part of it. It's like, maybe they need to tighten up the ship a little bit and like close off some of these little conduits that are going out where they're losing. Um, possible future ancillary profit streams that can make, you know, another 10, 15, 20 million a month and just make it that much more valuable.

Jake: Maybe they are thinking about doing an IPO. Maybe they are being approached by a big conglomerate that wants to purchase them and they need to like do certain things or have certain metrics or hit certain benchmarks. And this is a part of that process. Yeah, who knows? So that could be, I, I tend to lean towards, that's kind of what's going on behind the scenes.

Jake: If you ask me, you know, that's, that's a big payday for these guys and they've been doing it for a lot of years. And the person, the CEO is one of the people that started the company, stepped away from the company, put a different CEO in there, completely took the company in a wrong direction. They gave him the axe.

Jake: He came back in, kind of rioted the ship and has been adding stuff. But it's kind of funny when I watched the Ray video and read his little blog thing, he's like, every time they do something good, they always come along and just [00:50:00] hit you over the head with a hammer and piss everybody off. And it's just like, all right, why do you keep doing this?

Jake: Like, it's like, just, you're just waiting for the other ship to drop. Because they're the only game in town and they know they can. Yeah. 

Matt: Yeah. Well, and I think that for this, the, they probably have known that this is an issue for a long time. If they want to have these features in the future that they're going to be, they don't want to compete against their own API, then they are going to have to pull this bandaid off at some point and be like, this might piss off a couple of people.

Matt: Well, let's just change. We're going to change our API usage rules and hopefully we do it around the holidays and no one notices. Well, we noticed. So, 

Lance: okay. So big questions. What about the, the, the training apps that people use? Are those affected? Like trainer road, like fast cat, like, I don't know, what are the other, you know, AI coaching apps, training peaks, training peaks.

Lance: Yep. All those things. 

Jake: Does Zwift get affected by this? Because it doesn't [00:51:00] well kind of, well, wasn't there something set up with all of the segments? Didn't somebody go through, I kind of thought I saw something about that. Anyway, we'll say that it doesn't. So I will. So to answer your question though, no, I don't believe that they're going to be affected by this because right.

Jake: The. unit that you're using. You generally set that up to push to that directly. Correct. It doesn't go to Strava and then to that other, um, entity. So trainer 

Lance: road, that's one of the biggest ones out there right now. And yeah, the, the, the ride data pushes directly from your Garmin or from your Wahoo or from Zwift, they go from those sites straight to trainer road.

Lance: They don't go through. Strava, and then just train road, fast cat, same thing. Same thing. You're right. It's two training peaks. Same thing. They go straight from your computer, not through Strava. So those apps. aren't affected. They've already insulated themselves. 

Matt: Yeah, it's interesting. The direction of this data is all very interesting, right?

Matt: It's like, for you, both of you guys, it's [00:52:00] Wahoo through their Wahoo app. Yes. Again, that's your data that becomes Yes. They're ok with you sharing that to um, Strava's API, which then it becomes Strava's data. Uh, but Wahoo could turn off their API and be like, yep, we're not doing this anymore. We're not going to share our data with Strava because we want to do our own social platform.

Matt: So they could do something similar to that. So, yeah. But it would be weird because they're so competitive with Garmin, who also does the same thing. You go to the Garmin Connect app, that's where all of your data gets dumped into, all of that data gets forwarded on to Strava, Strava then forwards it on to apps.

Matt: You mentioned like TrainerRoad and places like that, they're getting that data from the kind of primary spot, like the Garmin spot or the Wahoo spot. Yeah. There's other apps that I think are, you know, that are hitting the Strava APIs. There's like Zert and training road. Can all, all of these companies can get the data from wherever.

Matt: Um, I'm trying to think, um, Velo viewer is another like app. Then there's just neat little, there's a lot [00:53:00] of tiny little apps too, that are hitting the Strava data 

Jake: and just make the whole thing much more enjoyable, much more fun to dig into. Right. I need to look at different analytics, but 

Matt: it's interesting to see like, Hey, this data that.

Matt: It's not necessarily, it's like they're going through three, four different places. Like who gets to claim the flag that they own that data? Um, and is that really fair? Uh, I don't know. I feel like Strava, you're built on other people's data. Don't try to wall it off. And be like the, the one that's in charge of it.

Matt: It's, it's, 

Jake: it's all has to be like a big symbiotic relationship. They all need each other. And so when somebody starts putting up walls and, and, and, you know, creating like situations where you can't like cohesively exist, it would be 

Matt: hilarious. If, if Garmin and Wahoo like handshake, we're like, Yeah, let's just turn Strava off, they'd be so screwed, right?

Matt: Like, yeah, people use their phone to exercise and have that data go to Strava. I have a ton of runners that do that. And I'm like, just have your Garmin [00:54:00] watch do it. Like, it'd be so funny if Garmin turned off Strava, API access. 

Jake: Garmin kind of thought that they were going to try and do something along the lines of Strava.

Jake: I mean, they've got that on there where you can go in there and you can see all your stuff and you've got a lot of the same features, but nobody uses it. 

Matt: Yeah, nobody uses it. It's a lot of the same features that are in within Garmin Connect. You can have people follow you on Garmin Connect. You have a lot of privacy pieces.

Matt: It's a good platform. 

Jake: segments on there, but I don't think they do. Do they pull the segments from Strava? Or is it stuff that's generated through? 

Matt: I think they they use their own segments that are Um, runs and, and bike rides that are popular on from their user data that they have. Yeah. But 

Jake: when you go into Garment Connect, I, I haven't looked in a long time and I'm assuming it's still there.

Jake: They will have segments. It's like, oh, you did the, yeah. You set a PR on this particular segment 

Matt: badge and they have all this badge stuff that, yeah. And actually a lot of people, I have no idea. They have not. It's usually for a lot of people love the Garmin Connect. Yeah, it is. And as far as analytics goes, it's better than Strava.

Matt: Oh, hands down. [00:55:00] It's fantastic. So, 

Jake: okay. This kind of leads me to my next question, because there are a lot of things about Strava that are fantastic, but there are a lot of like little supplemental apps that you can use that are just far better than what they provide for some of the information. So like the first thing is would be like just getting a detailed, doing a detailed dive into the analytics of the metrics of your ride.

Jake: Is that the first place you go? Or do you go somewhere else to see? The metrics of your ride. If you're wanting to look at your power numbers and your heart rate numbers and all of the, the, the speed and cadence and all those training peaks, training training 

Matt: peaks, training peaks is excellent 

Jake: circles around Strava when it comes to that, I mean, Strava doesn't even have normalized power on it.

Jake: They've got their own little thing. That's completely separate and different. And it's like apples and oranges to everything. So you're going to go somewhere else. If you really want to see that information or that data, and just going back to like the element app or the Garmin connect app, you're going to see that information laid out.

Jake: Quite a bit better in my personal opinion. 

Matt: Yeah, it's, it's really well done on a lot of these apps. [00:56:00] And it's just one thing that's tricky about this is where you have like the Wahoo fitness app is excellent. You can see really good metrics Garmin connect. I really do like, I think it's excellent, but why like Garmin is never going to be like, Hey, Wahoo, send your data on in here and to Garmin connect and use our platform.

Matt: I mean, It would be kind of neat if they did that because then at that point, then the Garmin connect ecosystem could actually compete with something like Strava, but you have to be open to third parties is what, yeah. 

Jake: So my point is though, that there's other apps that are doing it better than they are.

Jake: So another example would be like, Um, like your route planning, like Lance and I have both had this issue before, but like you're somewhere where you don't necessarily ride ever. If you've never been before, you're like, I want to ride and do this route, but I have no idea where to go. So let's go create a route.

Jake: You've got two things that you can pull that up. If you're not using one of them and you're going to, um, and you're going to use Strava, chances are you're going to find yourself in a bad way in the middle of nowhere on a path or something like that. That's washed out or [00:57:00] completely not. 

Lance: Traditionally Strava has take their, their route, their suggested routes.

Lance: I have gone down unrideable roads or dead end streets many times on the Strava suggested routes. Then if I pick a route on right with GPS. So 

Jake: yeah, exactly. Lance uses this all of the time. I use it. When I travel sometimes, and I always get these crappy routes. If I use Strava, like I was in Arizona trying to do a gravel ride and no joke.

Jake: I got to the top of the mountain following this, this gravel ride. That's supposed to just be mixed services and gravel dirt. And I get to the top and these guys, these two Enduro bros look over me wearing helmets and full pads and full like Enduro bikes. Like, dude, dude, what are you doing up here? Oh, are you going to ride down this?

Jake: Some Mike. Oh, that's where the route's telling me. I'm not from here. Like, oh yeah, just be careful. And I looked down. I'm like, ah, crap. I literally had to shoulder my bike and I'm scaling down the side of a mountain trying to die, not die, like just take my life in my own [00:58:00] hands. Do you think 

Matt: it was just because of the, there was so much like, um, downhill cycling going on that the heat map was like, this is a great ride.

Matt: Yeah, great 

Jake: gravel ride. Yeah, 

Matt: great ride for you. And it was not. 

Jake: And like, I've had other times, too, where it takes you on city streets. There's no reason why you should be riding a road. In Arizona, even, like, I was riding down this road. I'm like, I'm gonna die. I'm basically riding on what feels like a freeway here with no bike lane.

Jake: And I'm like, get me the hell off this. And there's a road, 

Lance: like, two blocks away that you could be going down. Yes. 

Jake: So I've had that situation happen a few times. I had it happen to me in Texas, too. I thought I was gonna die. I mean, big ol 

Lance: duel. He's wanting to kill me and run me off the road. With Ride With GPS, they don't.

Lance: They don't create suggested routes, they only offer you routes that people have already written, done, and have allowed to be used as public. 

Jake: So, you have to imagine that people on Strava have done that as well, but it doesn't seem like they were using it. Now, things could have changed. I haven't used it probably in two years, so I don't know if they've made it better, but 

Lance: No, just, just last [00:59:00] month, um, I was doing a route with Randy Frost.

Lance: And we were trying to find a gravel route to ride from the cyclocross race venue that we were at. And it took us down a road that didn't exist anymore. Sure. We had to stop, backtrack, and find our own way around the canyon that it was trying to take us through. Yeah. And that was a Strava suggested route that we had to turn around on.

Jake: What other facets of Strava that they have there that you can use, whether you're free or pay premium, are done better on other apps? Sure. Can you think of anything? I mean, it's kind of cool that you got the pictures on there. You got the video and that's all kind of fun. And that used to be something that you have to use.

Jake: Um, Instagram, you had to post it. That was the only reason why I started using Instagram was because I wanted to be able to put pictures on my Strava. That was the only way that you could connect that. So I created an Instagram account and that's why my early Instagram was just all bike stuff and it would just push over there.

Jake: So now it's nice to see that they're doing that net works out really well. It's probably not as good as like a Facebook or, uh, whatever their social platform, but it's good [01:00:00] serviceable. But what other facets of Strava off the top of your head? Can you think of anything? I mean, if I could find something, I would use it over the, um, the club component.

Jake: Any day of the week, the club component is so neglected, but it's such a powerful tool. It's a great way to bring community together, but you know, it's an easy way for 

Lance: us to announce our, the club rides that we do. You can't just, you can't put hot links into them anymore. 

Jake: And that was the thing is they absolutely killed me.

Jake: You cannot do that. 

Lance: That was maybe like, it was like two months ago. It was not very long ago. They just changed that 

Jake: because I'm trying to send out all the information to go join our weekly Zwift rides and you need a link for that. Yeah. And I pushed out the first one, I'm like, what the heck, where'd that go?

Jake: I'm like, oh, that's right, I heard something about that. It went red, sure enough. They were having some problems with spammer, putting links in different things, and I, I personally haven't dealt with any of it, but they felt that the best solution to that was just basically turn off all links. All links.

Jake: You can't, you can't put any links in there at all, period. That's nuclear option. Yeah, [01:01:00] exactly. 

Lance: That's what DC Rainmaker called is the nuclear option. They shut it all down instead of just suspicious looking ones down. 

Jake: So. Uh, we can't, we can't put that up there. I'm like, I'm having to like, all right, you're going to have to copy and paste this, and then you're going to have to go put it into your browser.

Jake: Then you're gonna have to change the word that says dot and put a dot there and then do that whole thing. And I'm like, all right, that's not going to work either. Cause people aren't going to do that. So I'm like, Hey, just go to our website. We've got our balanced cycling website. There's a link in our podcast.

Jake: That's got all the information for the ride. That's coming up with all of the hyperlinks. And you just have to remember to go there and you're just creating another step to get them to view that. It just sucks that they do that kind of stuff. So if I could find a better way to, you know, get everybody from Strava to be on a, an app that, you know, it's kind of like how we use discord with a Zwift.

Jake: I mean, Zwift, there's no excuse for them not to have that knowing that RGT had it at some point and it worked great. 

Matt: It's so funny. I was on this like, um, media call with Zwift and it was like this really, it was really cool. Cause it was like this specific [01:02:00] ride where they were showing, they're previewing the Jarvis route, which is like this new route that they just introduced like a couple of weeks ago.

Matt: The 

Lance: original route that they first ever did. They brought it back. 

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Super cool. Pretty cool. It was super cool. I wrote it last night. It was great. But like we did this like media ride and they're like, okay, you'll join this group with this account and you'll be on this thing and they'll show it to you early.

Matt: And then We're all going to be talking, but we're going to use hop on this discord. Like we can't do it on Zwift discord, huh? 

Lance: Wait, this was from Zwift. Yeah. They had you add 

Matt: discord. Use discord. Yeah. Come on, come on. So they know they have to know that this is so, this is low hanging fruit. It's been low hanging fruit for.

Matt: Like, they're using it, they're using Discord, they gotta, they gotta know, like, 

Jake: Just do it. Everyone's, 

Lance: if you wanna do a ride with a group of people, Okay, here's, here's my problem with that. Okay. There's, there's two things that I think are a problem with that. Yeah. One is, if I'm doing a ride with 150 [01:03:00] other people, I don't want the channel open to everybody.

Lance: If, if like, if, if all 150 people can be on the Discord, that's just friggin, that sounds like a mess. 

Matt: But yeah, that's a good point. And maybe that's something like, you know, you, I don't know. There's different tools for this, right? Where, um, a lot of the, like, um, I, I, I don't want to like promote Twitter or X, but like they have this platform where they, uh, I don't remember what they call it, where they, they have these like discussions and anyone can come in and listen to the discussions, but only key people can actually speak.

Matt: I don't remember what they call it anyway. And, but there's actually a number of these different, maybe there's a way to do, there's a way to do that. Right. Right. So. Zwift would be a fantastic company to be like, Hey, we don't want 150 people ever 

Jake: jump on that anyway. I mean, you could make that an option, but for having that component built into Zwift, you would have to use that for like club rights.

Jake: Or maybe if it's like, you can jump in there, then you can click on the things that's like only my friends, [01:04:00] only people that I'm connected with and I follow. So if you're at the club or just the people that you follow or everybody, that's just a simple toggle, right? I'm sure that that's pretty easy to program.

Jake: Right, Matt? No 

Lance: problem. My other potential question is, is it a bandwidth issue? Yes, yes, it is definitely a bandwidth issue. It's already using a ton of bandwidth. You notice how you can only see like the hundred writers around you at any given time? Yeah. Like if there's more than a hundred writers around you, You only see the hundred closest to you.

Lance: Otherwise it's, there's like chaos, it's chaos. It's like too much bandwidth. 

Jake: Here's a question for Matt then, is there a way for them to partner up with discord and then have a discord thing built into it? That's not run on the, the Strava bandwidth part of the whole deal, but you can still like click through on Strava and kind of have it pop up and be one in the same, but two separate entities, 

Matt: they could, so two separate apps and the problem is, you know, I think.

Matt: I think what a lot of us are probably doing [01:05:00] is using discord on a different device than than Strava on a different and having like, sorry, Zwift and then having discord on a different device. And that's what I do. My Strava is 

Jake: run on my, not Strava, but um, Zwift is run on my iPad and then I use a discord on my phone.

Jake: Yeah, same. That's 

Matt: what I do a lot too. Yeah. And that works really well. I think that The smart move for Zwift would be use that companion app. They have that companion app. I feel like it's kind of like the neglected, like redheaded stepchild of Zwift. It kind of gets like put aside like, oh yeah, we do have that thing.

Matt: The companion app is actually pretty nice. 

Lance: I use it on every ride. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lance: It's, it's helpful. It's helpful. It's 

Matt: super helpful. And it's nice. And it's like easy to operate and just kind of do things. And that's the place to do it. Cause then you're not going to have bandwidth issues and you're not going to have the overhead of having all of that void connection, all of that data that's coming across and trying to have like your, your ride data come through as well.

Matt: And, and we talk [01:06:00] about like how this is such a low hanging fruit and it's so easy, but like there's still only a very small percentage of people that want to set up a conversation with a group of people. It's probably pretty small. It's, it's club rides maybe, 

Jake: but that, that's how you create more people.

Jake: If you make the club component. More valuable. If you make it something that's easier to use with more pressure, pressure for people 

Matt: to join, if 

Jake: I'm going to start putting on rides and like, crap, there's like 30 people doing these, these dialed rides. I have a little bit of FOMO. I want to jump in and be a part of that as well.

Jake: I want to be able to communicate with them as well. And if they're going to make it that much easier, because. There are a lot of people that just don't jump on our discord because they're like, technology is hard. Yep. It's really not that big of a deal, but it's just one more thing that you got to worry about.

Jake: But if you made that easier, make it lower barrier of entry and more people are doing that then like, Oh, I want to go do that too. Like I'll, I'll leave. You know, whatever Indie Velo or whatever, my whoosh, whatever to go be a part of that because I'm getting that FOMO don't want to miss out. 

Matt: Yeah, I think doing it through the [01:07:00] companion app is the right way to do it because it's already got like again, it knows who you're with.

Matt: It knows where you are within Zwift. It knows like if you have joined an event, it knows all of that stuff within the companion app. Might as well add a VoIP, like, piece to it, and I don't think it would be a heavy, like, engineering lift for them. I thought we 

Jake: were talking about Strava. 

Matt: Well, we You have to get on Zwift.

Matt: We are very fast to take sidetracks. We're quick. Quick to go down rabbit holes. 

Jake: Squirrel! Oh. Uh, yeah. Still a good value for you guys? Still worth your 80 bucks a year? That's not paying for it. I don't pay 

Matt: for it. I have paid for it in years past. What would make you 

Jake: want to pay for it again? I 

Matt: don't Well, so, so my runners that I coach all use it.

Matt: Uh, they use the, they all use the free account. Um, and I love being able to kind of keep track of them and give them kudos and like, just see what they're up to. Uh, [01:08:00] and you can see routes and things like that. It's, it's fantastic. And then we also do this thing where we track mileage and, um, and reward kids basically like you can earn a hundred mile shirt if you do a hundred miles over the summer or 200 mile shirt.

Matt: And we have been using Strava and it's been fantastic. If there was a coaching piece to it where I could say like, yeah, you know, our team uses this to track our miles and I need to keep track of, you know, your weekly mileage and then you'd be able to see that specific stuff. Um, like a little bit more, a lot of the coaching platforms have this.

Matt: In fact, even Garmin has this through like their Garmin connect. They have like a coaching system. That's really good. If Strava had something like that, I'd be like, yeah, I'll pay for that. I would pay for that because then I could really take care of the athletes that I'm taking, that I'm seeing. So, 

Jake: so what are we missing out on?

Jake: If we're just using the free version, you don't get to do the mapping, which sucks, right? The routing. Yeah. Yeah. So routing, you don't get, 

Matt: you don't get the, their AI. thing, but they advertise for that. It's like, we have insights for you. You 

Jake: [01:09:00] get the leaderboards, right? But you only can see the top 10. Yeah.

Jake: Is that how that works? The leaderboards 

Matt: are quite weird. Okay. That would drive you crazy. It would, it would drive you. You can see 10 and then like, you can see your best effort and there's all this great stuff, great out stuff around it. Gotcha. 

Jake: And if I'm not mistaken, you don't get the little pop up display on your head unit that you're using for the segments.

Jake: So you don't get the like countdown, like, Hey, it's coming up and for 500 meters, 200 meters, ready, set, go. Java 

Matt: segments on your computer are, which is huge and that's, that's probably, I don't ever use 

Jake: that. You don't? What? Not at all? I don't. Because it tells you while you're doing the actual segment how far ahead or behind you are.

Jake: It tells you where you are, 

Lance: man. I'm aware. I just, I just, how do you live like that? I don't know. I see a segment and I just like, I just go for it because I know where it starts and ends. 

Jake: And then just hope that you got it and then you get back. Cause you're like, yeah, I got it. Cause that's the way it used to be.

Jake: Like you're like back in the day when I used to use Strava, like before they had the option, like you knew where the segment kind of started, but it didn't tell you when it [01:10:00] actually started. So you're kind of guesstimating where it's at and you knew where the. finish was, and then you're paying attention to like your average, like you knew roughly how fast you had to go for how long.

Jake: And, and it's just all the things. So you're like crunching numbers and doing all the math in your head. And you're like, I think I got it. And then you go back and you upload it like, ah, damn it. I just missed it by a second or I got it by five seconds. Uh, 

Lance: case in point yesterday, um, I attacked. Two segments, pretty hard, but I did not, I just did them.

Lance: You have no idea. I just did them raw. And when they uploaded, I tied both segments. I tied for the KOM both segments. If you're 

Jake: using that for a workout, you're doing yourself a disservice because you're going to push harder. If you see that number, if you're falling behind just a second or two, you're going to push that extra little bit harder because you know, because you know, like you're still going hard.

Jake: I'm not taking anything away from Lance Helpler because he's giving 

Matt: his best frigging effort. How do you even like. Turn that off. Like, cause you're a premium person. And if you star a segment. 

Lance: Yeah. I only have like two, I just don't star segments. That would, that would do it. Yeah. [01:11:00] I only have like two segments starred.

Lance: Yeah. Yeah. So you just 

Jake: know roughly where they're at and roughly when they start. Yeah. Huh. 

Lance: Obviously I spend too much time on Strava. So I know where this segment, the ones that I'm interested in, I know where they start and stop. Yeah. So one of the 

Matt: things that I think is interesting is like, as a person that reviews cycling computers, Having Strava segments is a serious feature, which people will like buy or not buy a device based on that one feature.

Matt: They like that. It's very important. So Strava has a little bit of a, you know, gold satchel walking around with, they're talking to all of these cycling computer companies, right? Because they're like, Hey, Yeah, we could theoretically be like, we're not going to support Wahoo anymore. And people would be go berserk.

Matt: Right. Because they'd be like, Oh, I don't have my Strava segments on Wahoo anymore. Um, the, and then, and then you can see it like when you're like talking about Brighton computers and people are like, Oh, it's a fantastic device, but it doesn't have Strava segments or [01:12:00] whatever it is 

Jake: to say that that's probably the primary glue that holds the cycling community to Strava.

Jake: It is the segments, the segments. Yeah, 

Lance: I agree. 

Jake: I I can't think of anything else that's got a a greater impact on making sure that people stay there. If they didn't have that, then Geez, I don't know. I mean, I was actually kind of surprised to learn that like you could only see the top 10 and that, you know, they, they kind of took some of those features away.

Jake: Cause that's what's going to keep them on the platform. It's interesting 

Matt: that they had all those features and they, they were like, Oh, now we're going to have premium and take features away from people like that, that always left a bad taste in my mouth. Where it's like, make cool features. Yeah. Make a coaching thing, make an AI thing.

Matt: Do all those things. Give all the premium features to the people, but like, don't take things away from stuff. Yeah. When you already had it. 

Jake: And a hundred percent. That's the only reason why I pay for the premium is this support segments. Segments is the segments. I don't care about any of the other stuff because I can get right as good if not better.

Jake: You know, support for those, those needs through other apps. I mean, I love Strava. I've always been one of their [01:13:00] biggest advocates, and I've been, uh, paying premium members since I think 2010. Yeah. Or 11, somewhere in there. So it's been a lot of years that I've been floating around. 

Matt: Could you ever foresee, like in the future where like five, 10 years from now you're like, you know, let, let's, let's say 20 years from now you're old, you're not gonna hit any segments anymore, you're not gonna get any kms.

Matt: Yeah. Like, would you ever be like, I don't need Strava premium if the only, if I'm not gonna be able to do this? The only, 

Jake: well. No, I probably would stop paying for it, but I would still stay there because I like the community component of it. And I do like the fact that they're not shoving ads down my throat and that people are like, So you would stay on Strava but not pay for the premium?

Jake: Okay. Because I don't need their, their, their mapping. Right. The 

Matt: leaderboards are the primary thing. Strava 

Lance: will look very different in 20 years, even if it's still around. I'll just say that. Yeah. 

Jake: It will. I'll go 100 percent be something else out there. Yes, it should be something else out there by then.

Jake: But I don't know. I just, I just, like Ray said, I feel like they, every time they get an opportunity, Smacking people around just because they can, because like, what, what are you going to [01:14:00] do? You're going to leave? It's like the abuse of, you know, significant other that just keeps slapping you around, but you keep coming back for more, but I don't know.

Jake: I mean, it's not like they're massive things, but they're just, they're, they're being a little bit abusive to their base of people. And the people that, that, that are connected to them from a business perspective that I think just. Make them that much better. I mean, it's just kind of like the icing on the cake.

Jake: You're the cake, just own that. But what is it that you're doing? What's going on behind the scenes? That's the big question. Why are you doing this? And I think that we're going to see something probably in the next year or two. And either it's them really trying to like, Fleece the bottom line, not fleece the bottom, fleece everybody to make that bottom line grow a bit more, or maybe they do have something up their sleeve.

Jake: Maybe they want to be a training peaks competitor. You know, maybe they want to have something that's a better coaching platform or whatever. Cause what they have kind of sucks. It gotta be something coming. Anything else on that topic, boys? Oh, we kind of ripped it apart. 

Matt: Ray was awake. He says, yeah, just me causing [01:15:00] issues or something like that.

Matt: Whatever. He was, he's, I think he works all the time. He's ridiculous. Wait, I wanna, 

Lance: I wanna know what time it is in Amsterdam right now. It's probably two in the morning. Let's see. That's, 

Matt: it is, it's 10. 30 PM. Oh, that's not too bad, no. Well, and he's getting ready for that DC Rainmaker open house thing. Oh. So.

Jake: He just posted that video about Strava this week. It looked like he was somewhere more tropical. 

Matt: Uh, he moved, his family is moving, so he still has the DC Rainmaker cave, his studio is in Amsterdam throughout, until the end of the year. And then they're moving? His family has already moved to Mallorca. 

Lance: What?!

Matt: Yeah. 

Lance: So he's gonna move his cave to Mallorca as well? Yes, yeah. 

Matt: Everything will be moved. Fuck 

Lance: bitch. I want his life, man. . . 

Jake: Does he ever come back to the States at all? Uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He used to live in Texas, if I'm not mistaken. Is that where I think it was in? Well, okay, so DC Well, DC originally.

Jake: Originally, but then he went to tech aside. He lived in 

Matt: his family. He has family [01:16:00] in Seattle, and then he has, uh, his wife's sister, I think is in Florida. So they go to Florida a good bit. Okay. And, um. Dodge alligators. And, uh, 

Ian: yeah. 

Matt: And so he comes back, he comes back a good bit and he's always, and he also has to come back a lot for like the Apple event or the Samsung event or the, you know, there's a lot of things that he flies back over for.

Matt: So he travels. Sweet. I don't, I think it's gonna be harder to travel from Mallorca than Amsterdam. Amsterdam is really nice because it's like a hub. 

Lance: Yeah. There's a major airport there, but it's just, it's a short flight from Mallorca to Barcelona. 

Matt: It's a. It's pretty easy. 

Lance: Yes. Okay. Yeah. Sweet. 

Matt: It's another flight.

Lance: It's another flight. You're not going to go direct from Mallorca to Paris. New York. You 

Matt: can probably go from Barcelona to San Francisco? Yeah. Okay, 

Jake: sweet. Hey, Patreons. Oh, Patreons. Patreons. 

Matt: I was like, what is that noise? Those are Patreons. A 

Jake: Patreon drawing. So we [01:17:00] got our little jar of folks here that are our Patreon supporters.

Jake: Thank you very much. You help keep this little dog and pony show moving on and helping us pay for all of our bills. It's all good times. Um. Pay my automobile. We should have that sound. Bunch of stuff at the lab that's in that bin, but we've also got some dialed podcast stickers and some new dialed stickers too.

Jake: So you're going to get one of each of the stickers and you get to pull something out of the bag and we'll, um, well, yeah, that'll be all yours. Lance pulled something out of it. He shook it up really good. Pulled it out, unfolded the name and it is 

Lance: Terry Hamness. Heyo, Terry Hamness. 

Jake: Thank you, Terry. Thank you, Terry.

Jake: Um, for all of our Patreon supporters. Supporters. We greatly thank you and appreciate you. And if you are interested in becoming a patron member yourself, you can go to dial podcast. com and there's a big patron link right there on our freshly redesigned podcast page. Click on that, go through, pick a patron that works best for you.

Jake: And we'll go from there. 

Matt: Where can people go to find our podcast page? 

Jake: Dial podcast. com. It will take you straight there. It's all linked up and synced up and all that other good stuff. Um, also. [01:18:00] There's an additional way that you can support the show now, and it will go back into the same Patreon bucket if you want to do it a different way.

Jake: And that is, um, that same little tab where you can go down there and look to see like the, the show notes and the, the links and, uh, send us a text and all that other fun stuff. There's another link in there that says support the show. So it actually will go directly to the, the podcast. And if, um, I'm not mistaken.

Jake: I think that they have like a system where you can actually subscribe to pay a certain amount every so often, or you can just make a one time payment. If you do want to make a one time payment, um, do put something in the notes to us, like, whether it be thank you or whatever, but, um, we would be more than happy and love to, like, mention and say something about you and say thank you, and if there's something, like, that you want us to talk about or whatever, um, put it in there.

Jake: We'll give you a little shout out. Let us 

Matt: know. Yeah, so. And people should be giving us the. Highest ratings on. Thank you for bringing that up. I forgot to bring it up. 

Jake: It's been a minute since people have been putting, we get them every now and then, but we haven't asked. We say 

Matt: somewhere between five stars and five stars, somewhere in that range.

Matt: Um, 

Jake: and your [01:19:00] favorite platform, just go out there and give us a little review. That'd be awesome. And like you said, like that five star thing would be fantastic. Oh, so it's been a minute since we've asked for that. So thanks for reminding me, Matt. Uh, Lance, you got anything else you want to say about that?

Lance: I just sent a message to the dialed cycling podcast. Oh, great. Oh, cool. It says suck it. We'll get back to you next 

Matt: week. Oh, I already blew it. Tune in next week and we'll answer the question. We'll respond accordingly. 

Jake: That's funny, um, anyway, so thanks for everybody for supporting us. I appreciate it. Thank you, Terry, too.

Jake: You are the winner winner chicken dinner. Hey, let's do one last thing and get out of here. Who wants to go first? Oh, Matt Legrand, you go first. 

Matt: I always go first. Uh, I finally got my review out for the Hammerhead Crew video. That's the last video that I have posted. Next video that I'm Should be working on is on the amaze fit t rex 3 watch.

Matt: It's kind of like In a lot of ways. It's actually crazy. It's in a lot of ways it's very much like a Garmin Phoenix 8 with like a microphone and a speaker and an AMOLED screen [01:20:00] and It's big and it has a huge battery and it does like all these things 

Jake: Hold that up and just flash that me real quick and then I went away from it I'm like, oh, that's a nice new Phoenix you got there 

Matt: Yeah, so what's funny is what's the price of a phoenix just like round number thousand bucks.

Matt: Yeah, okay price of this 270 bucks on sale right now. Holy cow on sale right now for 240 bucks or 230 something Crazy that price is insane. The price is a 

Jake: watch Matt 

Matt: For the 

Jake: 279 bucks. You said 

Matt: the price is insane. I think it's more like 230 or 240 bucks right now on sale. So I really need to get this video out the door while it's on sale.

Matt: What's the battery 

Jake: life like? 

Matt: Pretty damn good. Um, I use it with the always on display on, and it doesn't always, I mean, the feature always on display is a little bit weird because like, so for AMOLED devices, you raise your arm and it'll wake up. Um, if you use it in that mode, They say it'll go 30 days, which is not exactly true.

Matt: It'll maybe go like 20 days. And then with the always on [01:21:00] display, I'm getting like over 10 days, like 10 to somewhere between 10 and 14 days. I'm getting the battery life's impressive. Uh, GPS accuracy is, seems okay to me. Accuracy is okay. I had some good, I've had some really good data with it and I've had like one of the sets of data that looked pretty far off.

Matt: Um, it's going to be, yeah, it's, it's a good option for someone that just doesn't want to pay a ton of money. Um, is it as good as a Phoenix? No. Um, if you're, you know, looking at a watch and like a thousand dollars sounds like an insane amount of money, this might be something to consider. Um, it's, but it's, you know, the comparison with the phoenix is, is such a, it's, it's very common, you know, comparison, but I really think that people that are shopping for a phoenix should shop for a phoenix and the people that would never shop for a phoenix should maybe consider something like this.

Jake: I'm just looking at it. I'm, I'm out. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Jake: No flashlight. No flashlight. Oh, that's a good point. I need to add that to [01:22:00] my review. Yeah, yeah. Does it have sapphire glass on it? It 

Matt: does not. 

Jake: Okay, so it's Yeah, it's stainless 

Matt: steel and, um, some sort of gorilla glass type. How 

Jake: does the gorilla glass compare to a sapphire glass?

Jake: Sapphire's way more, way more 

Matt: scratch resistant. Yeah. I 

Jake: need that in my life because I tend to like bump my watch pretty much all the time. So in the flashlight, I've probably already used it a half dozen times today alone. 

Matt: Oh, the flashlight thing is the best feature that people need to, need to consider for sure.

Matt: Yep. 

Jake: Cool. Yep. 

Lance: Uh, this weekend, uh, Scott Schultz is putting on his final cyclocross race of the season. Hey o! It's called, uh, Cross miss lights night race. Oh, I read about that. That's yeah. So it's going to be up at Washougal at the motocross park. It is a. Afternoon night race so and they've got all their christmas light displays up So you'll be riding through the christmas light displays and through the tunnels and whatnot It sounds like a whole lot of fun [01:23:00] first race starts at like two o'clock Last race is at like 7.

Lance: 40, it gets dark here at 4. 30, so the last several races will be in the dark. They will have the area lit, but, um, it should be a whole lot of fun. Isn't it supposed to be torrential 

Jake: again this weekend? There's supposed to be another, like, There is more rain coming. Cyclone, but not a bomb cyclone. 

Lance: But Sunday specifically doesn't look good.

Lance: Terrible yet. It might not rain on Sunday yet, but we have already had a whole lot of rain. Yeah. So, um, kind of fewer categories, uh, because this last year kind of combining some categories, it just a little bit different, but, uh, come out and support. His last race and 

Jake: you're going for sure. 

Lance: I'm not sure if I'm going, my daughter Kelty from Salt Lake is in town.

Lance: She surprised us this weekend and flew back for some family things. And we've got family things going on and I'm not positive. I'm going to go to this race or not. We are going to. See the movie Wicked [01:24:00] tonight. I normally wouldn't probably gonna dress up for this one. Should I should I put my witch hat on?

Matt: Barbie, the Barbie one, right? But I feel like they're if you have any way to dress up do it 

Jake: All right, dude, if I went to a movie I would fall asleep so fast I seriously, I don't know. I can't even remember the last time I went to a movie and I do remember though, the last time I went to a movie, I don't remember what it was.

Jake: I fell asleep. I don't know what happened to me. I just got old. So cool. That's it. That's it. Yeah. You out? I'm out. Sweet. Thank you, sir. Um, I really don't have much to share. I've got a lot of things going on. Oh, here's one thing that you can do. Just a little ask, if you will. We've got the holidays coming up and we've got the Dialed Cycling Lab, right?

Jake: That's kind of a little thing that we do on the side here. And we're going to be sending out some pretty cool emails here pretty soon. If you're interested in getting an email from us that has maybe some discount codes that you can't, uh, Publish out there on the interwebs because it maybe violates map policies, if you will, for certain providers, [01:25:00] meaning that you can't advertise things below a certain value, but you want to get a good deal.

Jake: Join up, join or sign up. If you go to dialcycling. com, you can sign up to be on our newsletter and we'll add you to that list and you'll get the emails. And I promise you, we're not going to blast you with a bunch of crap and be an annoyance and you're going to get you know, five emails from us a day.

Jake: It's just, you know, 

Matt: so wait, so you'll post stuff to the newsletter and if some, like, are people allowed to talk about like the deals that are there or this hush hush deal? We can 

Jake: talk about the deals on that. We just can't put stuff up on social media or advertise it outside. Can I 

Matt: talk about like, cause I'm one of the videos I'm going to do, I'm planning on probably doing like a live stream on black Friday on like the morning of.

Matt: And just saying like, look at all these interesting deals. Like, this is fun stuff to like, just kind of keep an eye on. Cause Black Friday is a big one for tech, sports tech. Here's a perfect example. Am I allowed to like check the email and be like, Hey, here's the, here's a deal on the Phoenix. Yeah. 

Jake: You can't see what the deal is, but you can say it might behoove you to go check it out and use this discount code to see what the price is.

Jake: So, you know, let's use that as an example. Like for, so the [01:26:00] Garmin's got a bunch of stuff that just went on sale. Yeah. The Phoenix eight is not one of them. They're you're not allowed to sell that for less than the manufacturer's suggested retail price. It's part of their map policy, which is the minimum advertised price.

Jake: We have that as like, you can do that here in the United States. You can't do that abroad. Like in the UK, that's there. There's no such thing as map pricing because it's against the law to have that here in the United States. Unfortunately, that's just how it works. And they both have their pros and cons.

Jake: So. We're not allowed to say like, Oh, like this thousand dollar watch, we're having it on sale for 800 bucks. We can't do that. Cause Garmin will call us up and say, fix that. Or you're going to lose your, um, your dealer status status with us. 

Matt: But you're allowed to send that email out? 

Jake: Yes, because it's not advertised.

Jake: It's a closed network. It's our group of people. So I can't take that same email and publish it like on like Facebook, for instance. What if 

Matt: I, as a third, like complete third party independent person was like, I'm reading this newsletter and you can get a hell of a deal on the Phoenix right now. I'm not allowed to say the number though.

Jake: You can say that. I think if you said roughly what you saved, [01:27:00] but not actually saying that they're selling it for that. As long as they just, we can't put it up on our website, but if you talk about it, that's fine. 

Matt: What I bet you, I wonder if I could phrase it like this, like, um, I I'm, I'm subscribed to this newsletter.

Matt: You guys should subscribe to this newsletter also because the prices that I'm seeing on the Phoenix eight. are way better on this newsletter than you would get on what I'm seeing on Amazon. Cause we'll probably, my, my plan is to like pull up Amazon and look at, like, here's what, where prices are on different things.

Matt: Yep. Okay. Yep. Good times. So it should be fun. 

Jake: Thousands of people on that email list and I've been so stinking busy. I just haven't been sending stuff out, but it's going to be, we weren't going to be sending that out here in the next week. There'll be some pretty cool deals coming up. And you know, with black Friday coming out, where's the 

Matt: Phoenix eight going to be one of those?

Matt: Yes. This is a closed network podcast. We've actually had a couple of people like, Hey, you 

Jake: guys usually do some cool stuff and we haven't seen anything from you. You guys can be doing a black Friday sale on that. And like, we're not allowed to, but try this discount code. And they're like, Oh, thanks. And then the next thing you see an order come through.

Jake: And 

Matt: I tell people [01:28:00] like my discount code works on all of the pretty much everything on this entire site, as far as I know. So 

Lance: close to 2000 products. I know. It's crazy. So good times. So teaser for next week. Oh, the dialed podcast. Yes, sir. We are going to be discussing Black Friday cycling deals. Yep. Nice.

Lance: So that's the plan for next week. 

Jake: Growing list of things that we're seeing that are coming out there and I don't know, good deals that you might want to jump on. So some of that stuff's already started to know. So you might want to like start snooping around. Oh, use this as a perfect opportunity. Like if you find something that's a smoking killer, good deal, use that text us feature.

Jake: I wonder 

Matt: if like Silca has anything on like chain waxing or, I mean, they're going to have some black Friday specials, right? 

Jake: Correct. I've already gotten the emails from them as a distributor. They say, Hey, all of these things are going to be marked down. So. It's a crazy time of year for us to keep up with that.

Jake: It's like trying to drink out of a fire hose. Like you get it from all of the people. And it's like, Oh my gosh, managing that it's a bit of a chore, but it is what it is. It is [01:29:00] fun. Save some bucks. Cool. All right. We're done. See ya. Out. All right. Thanks for listening to the podcast. We will be back next week with another one of these and until then bye for now.