Strava times over official results, is that cheating?
An online watchdog group is calling out runners over the gap, and some of those runners say they have been harassed for it.
The Athletic asked a question that set off the running internet this week. Is posting a faster Strava time on social media, rather than your official race result, cheating?
The piece, shared by The New York Times, reports that an online watchdog group is exposing runners over discrepancies between the two numbers. Some of the athletes being called out say they have faced harassment over it.
Bitter says it is not GPS drift
The common defence is that GPS watches are imperfect, so of course the file and the chip time do not match. Zach Bitter is not buying that as the whole story.
"The problem is it isn't just small GPS discrepancy," he posted. "These clowns are stopping their watches while taking breaks and/or prior to crossing the finish line." His fix is simple. Start the watch at the start, do not stop it until you actually cross the finish line, and post the file if you want the Strava graphic.
These clowns are stopping their watches while taking breaks and/or prior to crossing the finish line.
Sage Canaday went further. He says the worst offenders are fitness influencers inflating a marathon PR with a Strava time that can be several minutes quicker than the real one, in order to sell more product and build their own profile. He compared it to cheating with PEDs, or to cutting the course and calling 25.5 miles a marathon.
David M (@davidmellyruns) made the point about motive. He flagged the gap between runners who say Strava is just for them and not for the internet, and those same runners insisting on posting the watch time over the result time.
What it actually means
Nobody in these posts is arguing that a few seconds of signal wobble is a scandal. The argument is about a paused watch and a published number, and about what an official result is for. A chip time is the one figure a race stands behind. A Strava file is whatever the runner decided to record and upload.
The second half of the story is the one that will not resolve neatly. The watchdog accounts are doing the exposing, and the runners on the other end say the response has crossed into harassment. The Athletic reports both sides of that.
The cognitive dissonance of "it's just for me, not the Internet!" and "I must post my Strava time over my results time
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