Bug Report - cycling - Strava allocates Garmin Paused time (while moving) as moving time.

[Karloss12]

I have a Garmin Edge 830.  When I go for my standard one-hour 'workout' ride, there is a 300-metre section of road which has traffic congestion.  To avoid having this slow and zero power section of road in my ride file, I pause the Garmin at the start of the congestion and then unpause it after 300 metres at the end of the congestion (approximately 50 seconds in duration).

Garmin Connect does a great job of removing the time and distance.  Garmin Connect essentially treats the 300 metres as rest time, where the rest starts at one location and stops at another.

Strava on the other hand, adds the 50 seconds to the 'moving time' without adding any distance, power, or Heart Rate data (because there is none).  This makes no sense and results in an artificially lower average speed and average power.  In Stava, when I switch the activity type to a 'Run' and then switch it back to a 'ride', Strava gets the correct and identical moving time to Garmin and says that there is an error with absent GPS data.  While this is technically correct, in reality the Garmin file contains no data at all for the entire 50 seconds.  Why doesn't Strava do what Garmin does and just pause 'moving time' when all data stops (including time stamps), and restart when the data stream flows again?

Perhaps during a 'race' dealing with the traffic congestion could be unfortunate and unavoidable, however during a 'workout', having a 300 metre, 50 second rest is okay.  Starting a rest at one location and ending it at another isn't unreasonable.  Garmin has no issues with doing this.

Strava seems to not be following its own help and advice:

"Strava relies on the recorded "timer time," which is when the app or device was unpaused to determine moving time. As long as your device is recording conventional pauses, Strava will respect any pauses recorded in the file, whether your device pauses automatically or you manually hit the pause button. It's important to remember that if you choose to pause, you must do so consistently. If there are any pause events in your activity file, our server will not remove any additional resting time."

Why is Strava not respecting my 50 second pause where there is no recorded "timer time,"?  Garmin does.  There are occasions where I forget to unpause after a set of traffic lights.  When I notice my error and unpause (without going back to the lights), 5 minutes of time is added to my 'moving time', but no distance is added.  This makes no sense.

The issue occurs on my ride on 29th May 2024, 1 hour, 19 minutes, 16 seconds into the ride.

[Jane · Accepted solution]

Hello @Karloss12 

Thanks for posting about this. I can see you've been looking at this article on how we calculate moving time, which I would recommend.

Apologies for any any confusion if it isn't clear, but we use different methods to calculate moving time for runs than we do for cycling.

For run activities:

"When uploading runs, Strava relies on the recorded "timer time," which is when the app or device was unpaused to determine moving time"

For cycling activities:

"Strava relies on GPS data when recording cycling activities to determine whether or not you are moving"

For this reason, I wouldn't recommend pausing your Garmin device when recording a cycling activity. If you do, Garmin doesn't record any distance for the length of time your device is paused, but Strava does continue calculating your moving time from the GPS coordinates that your Garmin continues to record.  That results in the scenario you described where "minutes of time is added to my 'moving time', but no distance is added"

The good news is that you should be able to go back and correct the activities where that happened, by switching your distance stream from device distance to GPS calculated distance.

Here's how to swap your distance on Strava to use GPS data rather than the generated distance stream.

To swap your distance stream:

• Go to your activity page on the website (this feature is currently not accessible in our mobile apps)
• From the activity page click on (◦◦◦) the more options menu > Correct Distance.
• From the pop-up, click "Correct Distance".
• When the status changes from "Calculating" to "Updated," refresh the page.

If you would like to revert the change, you can click the same link and click "Revert Distance".

For more information, see our article on How distance is calculated for your activity.