Kloofendal

[claidheamhmor]

All quiet on the running front. I've done a new Parkrun, Riverfields; that was basically a big rectangle around farmland bounded by freeway, but there were some nice duckies there. It was Roodepoort Parkrun's 400th anniversary on Saturday; they have only missed one, back in 2014; it was cancelled due to lightning, and I was so annoyed. I've done Roodepoort 181 times myself. Last weekend I took a 14k run up to the Kloofendal and Constantia ridges; it was a tough climb, but there are amazing views from up there. The suburb of Kloofendal is, I reckon, the most beautiful in Joburg. Here's a view from one of the little dead-end roads up there:

I'm still having issues syncing Discovery to Suunto, and Discovery don't seem to have fixed whatever issue is going on. They just manually upload my data when needed. I've noticed that the Suunto watch doesn't do elevation correctly. I'd noticed it was under-reading by a lot, and then I found an "elevation correction" option in Strava that examines actual know altitudes, and corrects accordingly. This changed Roodepoort Parkrun's elevation from an obviously wrong 20m to the correct ~95m. I'm a little surprised, actually; my old TomTom was always 100% correct on elevation, so I don't know why the Suunto gets it wrong.

I was reading reviews of the new Huawei Watch GT2. It sounds like an amazing sports/smart watch, with just about everything you can imagine, including speaker and microphone for phone calls, space for music, long battery life, the best screen on the market, etc. The one thing it can't do is integrate with Strava, which basically eliminates it as a sports watch. Pity.

Comments

[filialucis]

I've noticed the elevation issue too, but interestingly enough Strava doesn't always manage to correct it. Today's run shows up in Suunto with 7m ascent (which is plainly too little) and 21m descent (which might be correct if the gradient of the route were constant from highest point to lowest point, but surely too little given that the route undulates). When I try to correct the elevation in Strava it stays unchanged at 7m. Bah.

Also, I've noticed that the exact same route will show up on Strava with different figures for elevation between one run and another. Go figure.

[claidheamhmor]

Maybe your routes are not run enough. I bet Strava uses elevation data from other Strava uses, as well as known elevations.

[filialucis]

Apparently it doesn't use Google Maps elevation though! :D

As for not run enough -- judging from the heatmap on Movescount I'm certainly not the only person running my routes -- they're lit up pretty well and odds are that there's more local runners out there who don't show up on Movescount as they use Garmins or Tomtoms or whatever. I wonder whether there's some kind of minimum threshold below which Strava is prone to spitting out random numbers?