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As an avid downhill mountain biker/snowboarder, it would be cool if Strava worked the way Slopes (getslopes.com) does, where chairlift rides don’t count towards a total activity distance.
This issue is a significant problem when looking at the monthly cycling climbing challenges. The top spots in the leaderboards are filled mostly with downhill riders who are using lift-assists or shuttles for getting back to the top, but recording all of it. Some are getting 20-30,000 feet or more in a single ride.
This has been a persistent problem for years now. I was really hoping that the Mountain Bike activity type would fix this problem (although it also comes up for roadies taking a ferry or train sometimes). It would really be as simple as a checkbox "Don't include paused elevation for this activity".
Especially if the trails in your area are on Trailforks, I highly recommend it for mtb stats and tracking (and they automatically recognize lifts in activities). You lose out on some of the segment functions on here, but until Strava demonstrates they care at all about mountain bikers, they're not worth supporting.
The simplest fix would be for strava to allow us to crop out sections of an activity, similar to being able to crop the start or end, as many times as needed, so we can manually remove the lifts, or anything else a user would like to remove from their activity. Another fix could be to "flag" a segment as being a lift, and have the elevation and distance of that segment removed from the ride.
@drewu I like the idea of flagging a segment. Most chairs I've ridden have it set as a segment already, with everyone vying for that rare day with a tailwind and an over-zealous lift operator. (The truly unachievable KOM/QOM)
@drewu - Actually, the simplest fix would be for Strava to employ features already used by other platforms that automatically remove lift rides from activities if the user identifies the rides as a downhill activity. No reason the user should have to go in and manually crop out 15+ portions of an activity when there is computer code already out there that would do it automatically.
I do agree that it would be nice to still have the option to crop out a portion in the middle of a ride just in general because sometimes an odd situation happens (say you catch a ride in a vehicle somewhere in the middle of a longer ride) without it splitting the activity into multiple separate activities.
Thanks for posting about this. For activities on Strava set to activity type "alpine ski" or "snowboard", any elevation gain does not count towards the activity elevation.
For other activity types, such as mountain biking, the best workaround for now is to pause your recording device while you're on the chairlift. Elevation gain and distance during the paused portion will not count towards your activity metrics.
My alpine skiing chairlift distance and elevation are added to my totals. Is it because I track with Garmin and sync with Strava and then change the activity type to alpine skiing? I prefer to track with my watch because it tracks heart rate and better GPS.
The issue I have is when Strava is connected to Apple Health the total day, with all the chair lift distance, gets added to my stats when it writes the data. This happens with any activity involving a lift no matter how I record it... Stava, Slopes, Skitracks or Apple Fitness. How do I turn this off without messing up my settings for other activities like MTB and running?
Please implement this right away, Strava. When I see my year-end stats, it's ridiculous because of all the lift time at the bike park. It also throws off any cycling groups that I'm a part of as I'll show these vertical statistics that rival the most die-hard road biker.
Pausing my Garmin on the lift is not a realistic solution b/c of the likelihood of forgetting to un-pause and the risk of missing one's following runs down the hill.
I would love to indicate when I am riding downhill mountain bikes via a chairlift and have the uphill chairlift portions not count in the mileage and/or elevation gain. If I forget to pause my ride during the chairlift it adds the chairlift mileage and elevation and all the roadies get mad because I’m beating their miles/elevation. Seems like it could be a simple fix.
I do not understand how this isn't changed yet - it has been an issue for years now, and I have read several different comment threads on this on strava recommendations.
Pausing the ride still doesn't help - somehow the elevation gain gets counted. I would appreciate if this is changed - planning a bunch of lift assisted rides this summer and don't want to split them into several chunks, which seems to be the best option at the moment.
As an avid bike park user, I would love to have a specific activity type to keep track of those rides. I appreciate the proposed solution of pausing on uplifts. Unfortunately, that's rarely workable. It adds in specific steps you have to remember every lap and is prone to mistakes. It's equivalent of asking a skier to do the same.
A gravity focused ride is very different athletically then a two-way MTB ride. #of runs, vertical on the day, fitness with respect to KOMs are all specific to a bike park or shuttle day and don't compare well with a MTB or E-MTB ride. Besides, who doesn't want to show off their huge day at the Whistler Bike Park as its own activity type?
