So. I’m currently in place 62, and was within 20 streets of place 61 (which I held briefly this summer). Today, the separation jumped by several hundred streets. I’ve had a day or two like that (Venice, Italy for example) so while I was bummed, I was also excited to learn where this person accomplished such a feat. Their activity is public. And something just doesn’t add up. There are no activities in the past few weeks with more than 30 streets completed, and on the date the big jump happened, there was activity with 0 streets.
So what is this? An OSM update? A glitch? A huge batch of manual completions?
Curious more than anything. The competition drives me and I love it and this crew, so not aiming to shine doubt on anyone’s accomplishments, but also want to know I can trust how the system works.
Almost certainly due to city updates. Like you said, you were just on vacation; imagine you stayed and ran in a city that wasn’t yet incorporated into CityStrides during the week you are there. With 5-6 runs, 10-30ish streets per run, when the city finally gets added, your total will jump by 50-100+ runs.
That’s just one reason why I think CityStrides is most enjoyable when focusing on my own goals and balancing with my own lifestyle. I say this as the 10th ranked strider who no longer has any nodes within a 5 mile radius of my home, and professional/family obligations that prevent me from doing more than 1 or 2 CityStrides-oriented activities per week at this time, while the striders ahead of me are running dozens of streets every day. Much like running a race, most folks are competing with themselves for a PR or some other personal objective. I’m focusing on running every day even if its near my house, staying in race fitness, and finding ways to fit exploring/CityStriding into my schedule when I can.
I have the addiction too. I look at the standings every day and even keep copy over my total counts to my own spreadsheet daily as well. Noticed the same thing where all of a sudden my rank drops by 1-3 spots and some names end up on the same page near me that I’d never noticed before. Or I notice my own total street count have a drastic reduction about twice a year where I lose 60 streets out of nowhere.
Curious to know more as well, but I was thinking maybe it comes down to the things mentioned above for the most part. Doubt as much it is new cities getting added as that seems to be a confusion on how and who can perform it and then the backlog to implement here once successfully drawn out in OSM. Was thinking more likely edits to already existing larger cities - removing or adding streets or a temporary false personal total street count when larger cities struggle to reindex(?) or fully sync.
@dean.disimone , feel free to take a break and let me catch up.
They might not be fully public, either. People can set themselves to per activity - useful if they want to appear on lists throughout the site without having their individual activities visible.
Thanks, @kevincharlespels - glad you jumped in here because it’s always good to get the perspective of someone that has put a lot of miles behind them. I, too, think it’s pretty important to balance the goals with the lifestyle, but I will say I really enjoy the motivation of those immediately surrounding me, as it pushes me to get out every day. Just for context, I’m trying to complete the entire city of Los Angeles and @stst415 has been a major motivator with the work he has done. And for what it’s worth, I, too, have that radius challenge with home, so getting in the car to hit new destinations is a daily practice.
This thread is awesome. And it makes me feel lucky that in the SF Bay area I have people like @tpillow who is SO far ahead of everyone else that I just humbly roll thru my local neighborhoods without trying to catch up ;-).
Run on, friends!
Haha, thanks! Best of luck to you @t_stuermer (go Toms!) I’ve been working on the bay area for about 10 years now. It’s funny because no matter how much I run in a week, I still rarely end up in the top 10 for the month. As @kevincharlespels suggested, I find it best to just to keep at my personal goals. I also wasn’t a very active user for awhile and at one point realized I had 1000s of streets that hadn’t been counted and I remember James Salmon (2nd place) being quite disappointed since they all came in at once and his race to catch me became that much more difficult. Don’t remember the issue but somehow a year or so of my strava activities had not connected/synced/etc.
