Strava Best Efforts – A Great New Subscriber Feature

Last August STRAVA introduced Best Efforts For Runners. This is a nice feature to check your PBs/PRs for each year and all-time. For runners, this feature mostly covers the standard race distances but it’s more nuanced for cyclists with bests considered for elevation gained in a ride, best single climb per ride, and then speed bests over various distances and power bests over time durations up to 2 hours.

You can immediately see your BEST EFFORTS on your Strava profile…or at least you can if you are a subscriber.

The Details

Strava Best Efforts tracks your top three efforts in five categories and includes indoor cycling as well as outdoor cycling.

Distance PBs/PRs are in multiples of 10k up to 100k but also show milestone performances at 100 miles, 180km (Ironmish distance) and 10 miles (standard TT race distance).

Power durations are also sensibly selected to broadly correspond to typical test durations, and durations that correspond to bests for your body’s different physiologies. For example, 5 minutes is about a VO2 max effort and 2 hours is probably your real forever power (CP). 20, 30 and 60-minute durations might be used by some for FTP proxies or to calculate FTP.

• Distances: 10 km, 10 mi, 20 km, 40 km, 50 km, 50 mi, 80 km, 90 km, 100 km, 100 mi, 180 km
• Power/time intervals: 5 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, and 2 hours
• Best efforts – your 3 best efforts of all time are noted and Strava also highlights your 5 best performances in each calendar year

Take Out

This is a nice feature that will probably appeal more to the performance cyclist and improver cyclist in equal measure.

I regularly look at power duration breakthroughs every week (or the lack of them) but other cyclists I regularly ride with could instead be interested in mileage or vertical metres. We’re all differently motivated and these metrics seem to cover most of the bases.

Before writing this I had a quick check of my running bests. The issue I had was that a few rides had crept in to spoil the numbers. OK a bit of housekeeping soon sorted that out but it was a faff that I didn’t want. I’m generally tidy with my sports data but I’d imagine some of you aren’t and having to reclassify many tens of activities just to get your PRs/PBs will be a daunting task for some.