Requirements
Do I need to be a Strava Premium User? No, premium membership isn’t required. We do advocate premium because they do offer good feature set at this membership level. Particularly important if you have a power meter.
Do I need to have a power meter? No, power meters aren’t required. That said, many of the core features are centered on power. If you’re using the platform to get stronger we suggest a power meter. If you’re using it to enhance the experience (e.g. Gear Notifications, Athlete Finder) fire away w/o power.
Do I need a heart-rate monitor? Like power it’s recommended if you’re looking to improve performance but not required. Less important than power but a focus nevertheless.
What sensors are recommended for best results? The system takes as much data as possible off your training head unit (e.g. Garmin 510). Ideally you have cadence, speed, power, heart rate, temperature, altitude, and time of day. The more context the algorithms have the better they are at predicting.
What settings are required in Strava? Weight and FTP are two key attributes in Strava our app relies on. Without these we’re unable to calculate watts/kg or any of the interesting metrics training with a power meter yields. Your power to weight is used extensively throughout the site and algorithms.
How to best maintain weight in Strava? We recommend updating it when you’re hitting a new training block and when this is any material change. One technique we advocate is connecting your Strava mobile app to Apple HealthKit and allowing it to maintain your weight via a consumer IoT device that is compatible with Apple Health. Additionally you can use IFTTT applets to facilitate this via Withings and Fitbit devices.
Signup
How much history does strive.ai bring over when I sign up? We bring over 8 weeks of activity history to establish your baseline Peak Thresholds and to train the AI Algorithms. This serves as a starting point and the system improves its algorithms when each time they expire (typically 2-4 weeks).
Do I need to visit strive.ai to sync new Strava activities? No, strive.ai synchronizes your activities a few times a day.
How do I know if my registration was successful? You’ll receive an email from bot@strive.ai with further instructions and during the beta a confirmation message from mike.wood@strive.ai when you’ve been activated.
AI and Machine Learning
Should I be worried if strive.ai isn’t accurate in its predictions? No, strive.ai is only as smart as the training data it’s received. It typically takes ~5 instances of a class (e.g. bike) to learn how to accurately predict it. For example, if you haven’t ridden a bike for a while strive.ai likely doesn’t know about it. It will learn more the more you use it and we train the algorithms every few weeks using the most recent examples of each class. It also may fail if you do something wildly different in a ride (e.g. get a flat tire and stop short of 10 miles)!
Why isn’t strive.ai predicting which bike I rode? It doesn’t engage this algorithm for users with only 1 bike configured in Strava or when the users training data only includes examples of one bike. It will get smarter over time as you use all of your bikes.
Why doesn’t strive.ai try to classify all the images I tag to my activities? The Strava API only offers access to a sufficiently sized image on the cover image for each activity. The thumbnail photos don’t have enough resolution for Inception v3 to properly classify.
Why aren’t my current friends in my Athlete Finder message? We purposely exclude them from the training data to help you find more friends!
Where is the master source of training data? Nearly all our training data comes from Strava as the primary source of record for things like Gear, Segments, etc. The only current exception is the history of watts/kg on segment efforts is maintained in strive.ai since Strava doesn’t have weight over time.
Notification
Why don’t I receive any notification from strive.ai? Make sure you’ve added bot@strive.ai to your email systems safe senders list.
What notifications are currently active in the system? Gear Alert, New Peak Threshold, Activity Achievements, New User and Athlete Finder.
Why doesn’t strive.ai update my activities when it sees a data mismatch? We’ve decided on a more passive approach as we’re getting started. We’ll likely add buttons to the notifications allowing you to ask strive.ai to fix a legit issue or tell us when we’re wrong.
Why is there a delay between when I upload to Strava and when they show up in strive.ai? Strava’s API is rate limited so we queue up new activities to make sure we don’t violate this limit. Additionally, often the data in the Strava app isn’t clean until a few minutes after the activity is auto uploaded from say a Garmin device. We want the user to have time to edit their activities, add photos, tag their bike, etc prior to strive.ai processing it.
Data Privacy
Can I use SSL? Yes, beta.strive.ai allows both encrypted and unencrypted forms of http.
Is my data secure? Yes, strive.ai only stores data it creates (that isn’t available in Strava) and majority is in the form of trained machine learning algorithms that are persisted for some number of days before they are retrained with new data. strive.ai encrypts your Strava access token and stores the keys to that encryption in a secure place. This access token is only valid for the strive.ai application.
Can others see my peak threshold information? No, this data is private to the user.
Can users see my watts/kg on segments? Yes, this data is displayed on strive.ai segment leaderboards within the beta.strive.ai website. The default view for segments in the application is to show the current users efforts.
Technology
What infrastructure does strive.ai use? The site, database and batch process are hosted on Amazon AWS using EC2 instances. This cloud first approach will allow us to scale out as demand increases.
How does strive.ai access my Strava data. Strava has release several API libraries to facilitate their developers ecosystem. strive.ai is a Strava API application. Our solution leverages the python3 bindings to the Strava’s v3 API.