"Moving time" on indoor rides is way too short

[JimRiley]

When I ride my indoor trainer - an old TurboTrainer type of unit, with no smarts of its own - the session shows up in Strava with a short but non-zero distance and a very short duration. My best guess as to what's going on is that the distance is based on GPS jitter that makes it look like my position occasionally changes by a few feet, and the duration is a "moving time" based on those position changes. When I ride the trainer for 30 minutes, with of course an actual distance of 0, Strava typically shows a distance of about 0.1 mile and a duration of about 3 minutes.

Tagging the activity as Indoor Cycling or changing the activity type to Virtual Ride has no effect. The same activity appears with the correct duration when I upload it to Garmin Connect, but it does also show the very short distance.

To make this a post about features, here's my suggestion:

When a ride is tagged as Indoor Cycling, and has a route that's confined to a radius of 100 meters or less, and has a distance that works out to an average speed less than 1 km/hour, make Strava smart enough to recognize that the athlete was actually riding in one place for the duration of the activity and that the "moving time" calculation should be skipped.

[Jane · Accepted solution]

Hello @JimRiley 

Thanks for posting about this.  When recording indoor rides, it's important to disable GPS on your recording device.  If you don't, the GPS data in the file makes it difficult for Strava to show the correct distance and speed for your activity.  

More information here

You might also want to check out this blog post on recording indoor activities.

Thanks again for your post.  

[JimRiley]

Thanks for the info, Jane. That's very helpful!