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Strava fails to reproduce the actual average power (not normalised or weighted) from a ride file, and somehow provides a data result that appears to show average power INCLUDING paused time - meaning that if we stop at the top of a hill to wait for our riding buddies, Strava is counting that time as 0 watts, and feeding that into the overall ride average! If it doesn’t do that, the only explanation is that Strava does something very creative that doesn’t match anything like reality.

Recently I engaged Strava support team on what is apparently an age-old issue with Strava (judging by questions on this forum), and got a garbled reply that didn’t explain what was going on.

Sadly for subscribers and Strava, it renders Strava pretty useless as an accurate training tracking tool, leaving you with no choice but to go to Training Peaks or Today’s Plan (yet another expensive subscription).

Have I misinterpreted the situation? Anyone with any ideas?

Strava includes the 0 W values only when it thinks you are moving. For some reason Strava doesn’t seem to acknowledge it as an autopause when you are waiting for your friends at the top of the hill. Maybe going into pause manually can help here. I only say maybe because the buggy Strava algorithm for discerning pauses only looks for GPS points so if you stop at one point and continue at another point it will still think you were riding regardless of the gap in the recording.

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