Add Winter Fat Tire Ride/ Fat Bike as activity type in Cycling Sports

[Solonamtb]

Right now there are a number of Cycle Sports, including “Ride,” “Mountain Bike Ride,” “Gravel Ride,” “E Bike ride,” “E-Mountain Bike Ride,” even “Velomobile ride!” But no Winter Fat Tire Bike ride. 

This is a problem because winter fat tire riding on single track trails is **much** slower than on a Mountain Bike in the summer.  

This feature request is to add “Winter Fat Tire Ride” so people in cold weather climates can effectively track winter rides. 

Without this feature, the app is far less useful for outdoor riding in the winter—we can’t track our progress, see PRs, see how we are doing on leaderboards etc. 

[Solonamtb]

@anchskie @Scout Snow riding *is* a different sport. It's like Velo versus road riding---you use the same trails/routes but the sport is fundamentally different due to vastly different levels of friction and thus what's possible for speed given input watts. When you do a different sport on the same trail, you need a different sport type, which is why Strava created eMTB and Velomobile sport types.

I take some of the blame for framing this as a "Winter Fat Bike" feature request rather than a "Riding through the freaking snow" feature request, I guess.

Also re losing historical data, so what? Better to have a working product moving forward! What's more, because snow riding is so much harder & slower than summer MTB, there won't be leaderboard slots occupied by snow riders!

Also, why would Strava fix it for Velo and E-MTB riders if it were so problematic? They were using other cycle/MTB sport types before Strava created new ones... It's only because people complained because you can go FASTER on Velo and eMTB. 

I worked in tech for a decade (FB/X) and I can only assume this decision was made due to a lack of understanding from Scout/others at Strava about what riding in the snow really means. 

[anchskier]

@Solonamtb - First off, velomobiles and e-bikes were not allowed to be uploaded to Strava before their separate sport was added.  Anyone who was uploading those as regular rides was violating the rules.  As their popularity increased, Strava added their activities but recognized they did not fit in the same leaderboards as regular bikes.  Second, there are plenty of times when a fat bike on snow is actually faster than a mountain bike or other bike on certain trails.  We have that all the time here in Alaska.  Many trails are much easier and faster to ride in the winter as the swamps, roots and holes get smoothed out into flowy packed snow trails.  Bottom line, the leaderboards would be useless if you tried to split them out now.  Most people would not properly designate what bikes they were using even going forward and you would still have all of the historical data in the system cluttering up the boards.  

[Rob72]

@anchskier - I do ride a same trail with different bikes: MTB and e-MTB from Summer to Fall then a Fatbike in Winter time (on snow or even ice sometimes). I can assure you, it's a different experience of riding in term of pace and work out. Fatbike riding would be very nice to track regardless of the season.