Strava – Epic Ride Weather

There’s a neat little app called ‘Epic Ride Weather‘ that gives great weather insights for your upcoming rides. It has good links to Strava but also to Ride with GPS and Komoot.

TL;DR: Visualise the exact wind right now for your segment hunting or check out exactly how the rain might affect your 8-hour ride tomorrow.

What Can Epic Ride Weather Show me

Powered by Dark Sky, and used by most TdF Teams, Epic Ride Weather shows you various lists of rides, routes, events and favourites. You can select any one of them to get a detailed weather forecast based (obviously) on its location but also on your speed as that determines your location (and weather) on longer rides.

The detail for each route comprehensively but succinctly covers Temperature; Rain and Cloud Cover; Wind; Wind Direction; Elevation; Daylight; UV Index and Humidity.

Example – Climbing a Mountain

Here is a long route I have for a climb in the Pyrenees, forecast to start tomorrow morning. You can see a steady rise in temperature as the day progresses but then a significant drop as I climb. Wind conditions are definitely not favourable other than a tailwind leading to the start of the climb.

I made that forecast assuming an extremely generous 25mph speed which I definitely won’t do. The average speed can be modelled as can the start time. With each of those changes, you can review the best start time to minimise the worse effects of the weather or maximise the best effects if you are segment hunting.

That’s it! Simple!

Tidbits

Well, there is more peripheral info and here it is via a quick Q&A

Q: Can I use my own GPX route files

A: Yes, that’s handy for races that provide them in advance.

Q: Are there alerts for the best time of day to do my favourite segments?

A: No. But there are other Strava add-ons and sports data platforms that can do that.

Q: Can I reverse the route?

A: Yes

Q: Could this help commuters?

A: Yes, frequently used start times are, kinda, shortcuts when you look at your commute route.

Q: What about running?

A: Yes it can help plan your runs and hikes too.

Q: Where do the routes come from?

A: There are many possible sources that you can link to including your favourite segments on Strava, RwGPS, recent activities on Strava, routes on Strava (Tours on Komoot), GPX files and more besides.

Q: Is this new?

A: Nope, it’s been around for over 6 years and is still regularly updated with subtle improvements and new mini-features.

Q: Is there any fancy way of copying the forecast to my Garmin?

A: No. You could probably side-load the app onto a Hammerhead Karoo 2 though.

Q: How often are the forecasts updated

A: The weather source data from Dark Sky is probably updated very frequently by Dark Sky however what’s important with this app is that it forecasts for every 10 minutes of your route.

Q: Can I connect this to Velo Viewer?

A: Yes

Q: Is it free?

A: The Epic Ride Weather app is free and comes with a 30-day trial with 1000 free forecasts which is about thirty or forty 100 km (60 mi) rides. After that, 1 Month’s Subscription is $2.99 or $14.99 for the year.

Opinion

The beauty of Epic Ride Weather is that it is a focussed app that does one thing well. Very well, in fact.

Many of us will have multiple locations saved in our most-used weather app – be that a holiday destination or the locations of family members. Epic Ride Weather follows a similar principle in that it is giving us the weather for something important ie over the entire course of a route rather than at a single town or city

Perhaps even more importantly, it’s better than most generic weather apps in that it gives all the relevant weather components that athletes and adventurers might need like wind and rain. I have over 10 weather apps on my iPhone and have spent several hours trying to find one that was a) free and b) able to show the forecast wind direction on my Apple Watch – it was incredibly difficult to find one that I liked (Windy.com BTW)

The final point that’s important to me is its ease of use. I usually cycle in one of 3 broad areas near where I live. Using the app, I know that I can favourite a typical route for each and then visit that favourite within seconds when I’m thinking about planning a ride

Great!

More: EpicRide Weather.com

Disclaimer: I got a free upgrade to the pro version, other than that no money has changed hands and I get nothing if you click on the app and download it. I’ll definitely be using it in the future. Give it a go.

1 thought on “Strava – Epic Ride Weather … An ‘Add-On’ for your Strava Data”

stoyan delev says:
13 August 2022 at 1:28 pm
that’s very useful app, I used it very often few years ago when was leaving in rainy and windy Netherlands. In fact I had the idea of building similar app before found it.

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Strava – Epic Ride Weather … An ‘Add-On’ for your Strava Data