Just out of curiosity I scrolled through some of the challenges currently open on Strava and was wondering.
I see folks who have spent up to 70h on the bike last week?! How is that even possible?
Some ride 1500+ km per week? Wow.
I am just wondering: are these real numbers? I would not be surprised that some distance numbers are not accurate (setting wheel circumfence…), but the time spent on the bike just leaves me breathles.
Having a job, family and other obligations I am happy to find the time for 10h per week, but 70?
Sure why not? There are plenty people in the world with time and dedication. I used to question it too, but then realized my situation is different than everyone else’s, and what does it really matter? I sure won’t be at top of any distance or time records.
Case in point - a local guy is 63 and an endurance cyclist. This summer he set out on a Guinness record, to cycle furthest in 30 days. He averaged 16.5hrs/day for 30 days straight, so he easily beat the 70 hours/week. This is only one example, there have been plenty people locally running 24+ hours in one go, doing a 48/96+ hour running challenges, etc.
With so many people recording activities today, there is certainly possibility of cheating, but there is also a high likelihood of someone genuinely smashing it.
I guess there might be quite a lot of folks riding the bike the whole day around…
But looking closer at some of those very active users it turns out that many upload their rides twice or even more times - on purpose or not, this puts some of the data into perspective.
I agree that there are some suspicious riders there with double entry from two different devices.
But maybe some people are lucky enough that the challenge coincides exactly with their real life cycling challenge, eg Land’s End to John O’Groats in UK, in which case they would have a massive amount of time/mileage.
Like most things cycling, the challenge is for me to reach my best, and to ignore the other people.
Some lucky Bulgars are fortunate enough to have cycling as their day job and IIRC a few years ago when folks were going for the annual cycling record (Kurt Searvogal, Steve Abraham et al.) They were all on Strava too.
