Heads up! The big Garmin annual spring sale has started, with $200 off the Fenix 8 (first sale to date!), $100 off the Edge 1050, Forerunner 965 at $499, the Forerunner 265, the new Instinct 3, and countless other Garmin products including inReach Mini 2. Plus the Apple Watch Ultra 2 Black Titanium is on sale, and some Suunto & Wahoo product deals too. Full list & thoughts here!
I’m DC RAINMAKER…
Here’s how to save!
Wanna save some cash and support the site? These companies help support the site! With Backcountry.com or Competitive Cyclist with either the coupon code DCRAINMAKER for first time users saving 15% on applicable products.
You can also pick-up tons of gear at REI via these links, which is a long-time supporter as well:
Alternatively, for everything else on the planet, simply buy your goods from Amazon via the link below and I get a tiny bit back as an Amazon Associate. No cost to you, easy as pie!
You can use the above link for any Amazon country and it (should) automatically redirect to your local Amazon site.
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Check out my weekly podcast - with DesFit, which is packed with both gadget and non-gadget goodness!
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5 Easy Steps To The Site
1
In Depth Product Reviews
You probably stumbled upon here looking for a review of a sports gadget. If you’re trying to decide which unit to buy – check out my in-depth reviews section. Some reviews are over 60 pages long when printed out, with hundreds of photos! I aim to leave no stone unturned.
2
Read My Sports Gadget Recommendations.
Here’s my most recent GPS watch guide here, and cycling GPS computers here. Plus there are smart trainers here, all in these guides cover almost every category of sports gadgets out there. Looking for the equipment I use day-to-day? I also just put together my complete ‘Gear I Use’ equipment list, from swim to bike to run and everything in between (plus a few extra things). And to compliment that, here’s The Girl’s (my wife’s) list. Enjoy, and thanks for stopping by!
3
Have some fun in the travel section.
I travel a fair bit, both for work and for fun. Here’s a bunch of random trip reports and daily trip-logs that I’ve put together and posted. I’ve sorted it all by world geography, in an attempt to make it easy to figure out where I’ve been.
4
My Photography Gear: The Cameras/Drones/Action Cams I Use Daily
The most common question I receive outside of the “what’s the best GPS watch for me” variant, are photography-esq based. So in efforts to combat the amount of emails I need to sort through on a daily basis, I’ve complied this “My Photography Gear” post for your curious minds (including drones & action cams!)! It’s a nice break from the day-to-day sports-tech talk, and I hope you get something out of it!
5
The Swim/Bike/Run Gear I Use List
Many readers stumble into my website in search of information on the latest and greatest sports tech products. But at the end of the day, you might just be wondering “What does Ray use when not testing new products?”. So here is the most up to date list of products I like and fit the bill for me and my training needs best! DC Rainmaker 2024 swim, bike, run, and general gear list. But wait, are you a female and feel like these things might not apply to you? If that’s the case (but certainly not saying my choices aren’t good for women), and you just want to see a different gear junkies “picks”, check out The Girl’s Gear Guide too.
Strava – the gift that keeps giving
So much entertainment!
Someday I hope we get the real story about why they decided to implement this clumsy regex bludgeon across the entire site and app. Was it just incompetence, laziness, or was it something so serious and urgent they had to go nuclear on anything that looked like an URL instead of building actual spam controls?
I have a different experience with bots on Strava – I receive follow requests from obviously bot accounts on regular basis (several per month) despite being a nobody. URL war resolved it completely.
It’s an interesting question. In your case, with a locked-down account, then the bot follows are trying to build up reputational credit.
But in my case, with an open account (I lock individual activities instead via privacy settings), anyone can follow. Except, that’s not led to the thing that matters: Spam comments.
Of course, if the ‘other thing’ that matters is someone having a link to XYZ site on their profile, and is a bot account, then yes, that’s spam. But I see that as relatively passive spam that requires you the user to click on the profile, and then decide to click onwards, versus active spam that comes into my inbox.
And finally the links work/are clickable on the mobile app. It pretty much sucked to have to open the browser version just to click on a link.
The most annoying thing for me was killing everything with a . in segments! Segments with . in their name worked on web version though, but not in mobile app. I need to check if it’s any different now :)
Huh, I just did a workout from Intervals.icu and Strava still strips “Intervals.icu” from the title: link to strava.com
Feels very silly to strip domain-looking strings from the titles when those aren’t clickable to begin with, but perhaps they haven’t rolled this back in that one place 🤷♂️
Hey, have there been any updates on Strava’s new API policy? Have they backtracked at all? Or are they not yet enforcing it?
but still not on normal user posts, apparently.
at least it now gives you an error (as vague as possible) rather than simply making the post and removing the link, I suppose?
“Inversely, Strava says that any previously removed links/content won’t be coming back.”
So contrary to what is said on their forums, they did irrationally delete them. Some of us had links to useful information regarding our activities. I for one included links to my official race results in my Strava descriptions. Officially, that is all deleted?
This is what pushed me to end my subscription. I have data going back to 2008 and all those links to results are gone. I could pull them out of Garmin connect, but Strava could come along again and delete them again.
From a spam prospective used to receive the bot requests, but I haven’t gotten on in years. It was pretty rare, and I just reported them.
Just checked an activity where I mentioned the domain name of a company van that happened to give me a massive slipstream advantage through a segment (as in full disclosure: I’m not really that fast) and it did not repeappear. Seems like they really removed those strings from the database permanently instead of just passing UGC through their oversimplistic regex on read. Talk about premature optimisation…
In engineering school I learned SI units and not to put a space between numbers and units. So would post “1mi@6.4mph” and Strava would silently erase that those metrics from my posts. Meanwhile, several times per week, nice young Asian ladies, who are clearly AI bots, start to follow me. It is as if Strava wants/doesn’t mind to have its users have an artificially high number of followers. I have always wondered if Strava is behind this ‘spam’ because they don’t ask for money or anything. It suspiciously helps them claim they have more women athletes and keeps some male egos high.
They made it difficult to post comments with info about several different rides. The rides are on different Strava pages. We like to have a post with brief updates for weather and links to the rides happening during the week.
Strava has half baked their club functionality and we make the most out of it. Having a platform to share maps and events info is key. Due to inertia we probably will not move away. There are some alternatives.
I wish Strava backtracks on the super annoying auto edit ‘function’. In the half year it is forced upon me I never found it useful. I either don’t want to edit a strava workout or I want to edit other fields than the auto edit offers.
Strava was even blocking my 21.1km run titles because it saw the %.% as a URL 🙄
Hi Ray,
Given the enshittification of Strava, alternatives start looking interesting. Trek just came out with their own platform. Perhaps problematic b/c it’s tied to a specific retailer, but interesting nonetheless. Will you be reviewing it?
link to trekbikes.com
This seems a bit like when Specialized tried to do the same thing a few years back. Ultimately, consumers won’t bite when it’s tied to a given manuf. Trek has long done interesting things in the realm of ‘one-stop-shop’ type services (not being cynical here, they are legit cool things, but really only interesting for Trek customers).
That said, given the giant fiasco this past fall with the Strava API, I’m incredibly surprised Trek would use Strava as a data source. And even more surprised Strava is even bothering to allow it (since it runs directly afoul of Strava’s long-standing and oft-used sword against “duplicating Strava” T&C provision).
Is Trek’s as lame as Specialized’s or Cannondale’s service? Only an app, very little ride detail.
That they did not restore the content they destroyed is incredibly annoying: I had links to official race results, other peoples’s ride reports, photo albums and much much more up there – all gone!! (Also, they just did it all *without communicating with the users in any way*!)
Clearly not fully fixed. I posted a YouTube link in a comment today and it went POOF! Sad.
3 May 2025: Strava censored out my run club url in a post in my run club’s strava club! Apparently I have to fill out a google docs form to convince Strava that our run club is really a run club before I can post any links to.club events.
At least the censorbot didn’t zap my 42.195km runs yet…