Moving and Elasped Time For Strava Segment

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BSRU

A Human Being
Location
Swindon
Just noticed the last two tacx virtual rides I have uploaded, have an elasped time much longer than the moving time for strava segments.
For the previous year or so the elasped/moving time have been almost identical, even though on longer segments the ride has been auto paused for interruptions.
But now the elasped time seems to be including paused time aswell.
This is causing a problem now as I cannot compare segments from new rides to segments from old rides.
Strangley the overall elasped time seems to still be using the overall moving time, i.e. not including pauses.
 

Legs

usually riding on Zwift...
Location
Staffordshire
Just noticed the last two tacx virtual rides I have uploaded, have an elasped time much longer than the moving time for strava segments.
For the previous year or so the elasped/moving time have been almost identical, even though on longer segments the ride has been auto paused for interruptions.
But now the elasped time seems to be including paused time aswell.
This is causing a problem now as I cannot compare segments from new rides to segments from old rides.
Strangley the overall elasped time seems to still be using the overall moving time, i.e. not including pauses.

Simple answer is not to stop. If you're doing virtual rides, and you want to have comparability of segment times, why would you need to stop?
If you do really need to stop (for a pee, or whatever), why not do it on a descent?
 

CXRAndy

Guru
Location
Lincs
Can't you just deduct the pauses from the total ride time. Quite easy to highlight the stops. It then tells you the duration

Or don't stop riding
 

Dogtrousers

Kilometre nibbler
Segments and virtual rides really don't mix.

Here's why. (This is for TACX trainers. Others may differ).

It's a bit long and complicated (and boring) I'm afraid.

A real ride outside records your time and location every second (say). It also records stuff like HR, power, speed etc if you have sensors for these. This is great because your location changes every second. If you move your bike a little bit, the recorded location changes a little bit. Over a minute you will have 60 (say) records, each with a different location. This all makes perfect sense. We end up with a series of points like this. I'm going to assume that you are recording Heart Rate, for the sake of illustration:

13:00:00 Location=L1, HR=H1
13:00:01 Location=L2, HR=H2
13:00:02 Location=L3, HR=H3 and so on where L1, L2 and L3 are all different locations as measured by your GPS and H1, H2, H3 your heart rate as measured at that time.

Things are VERY different for a virtual ride. A virtual ride consists of a series of waypoints, like a route. They are close enough for the route to have a recognisable shape, but there are significant gaps between them. Let's say for the sake of argument that they are 30m apart and you are going at a virtual speed of 27km/h. That means you will pass one route point every four seconds.

Now, your TACX trainer still records your data every second. It records your HR, power, virtual speed etc. as you pass through the various route points. But it does not interpolate between route points. So lets say that for four seconds your nearest simulated route point is R1. It will stamp four records with the location of R1. Then after that your nearest route point becomes R2, it will stamp the next four records with R2 which is 30m away. So it will look like this.

13:00:00 Location=R1, HR=H1
13:00:01 Location=R1, HR=H2
13:00:02 Location=R1, HR=H3
13:00:03 Location=R1, HR=H4
13:00:04 Location=R2, HR=H5
13:00:05 Location=R2, HR=H6
13:00:06 Location=R2, HR=H7
13:00:07 Location=R2, HR=H8 where R1, R2 are route points.

Do you see what's happening? Instead of a smoothly changing location, your location is jumping from route point to route point.

If this was a real ride your location would be smoothly changing showing all the intermediate locations between R1 and R2. But in the trainer records it jumps from one route point to the next.

This means that - apart from for plotting a map of where you have "been" (actually where you haven't really been) the locations recorded by a TACX trainer as you do a virtual ride are almost meaningless. Or at least they require very sympathetic handling.

Now along comes Strava and tries to match a segment to this rather weird series of locations, leaping from point to point.

If the segment is quite long and the route points quite close together this won't make all that much difference. But if this isn't the case things start to get crazy. Quite how crazy really depends on looking into the mind of the Strava matching algorithm, and that's not easy to do.

First of all it will only match route points that are inside the segment. So lets say your first route point R1 is 25m from the start point of the segment, and your last route R2 point is 25m from the end. It measures the time you took between those route points. You've just trimmed 50m off the total segment length. You get a crazy average speed for the segment!! But your max speed will still only be the 27 km/h that you were going between the two.

This madness is what enabled me to claim a Strava KoM with an average speed of 70kmh (just to prove a point). Tis bonkers.

Now, this doesn't answer why it's started including your paused time in your moving time. That's another question. But what it does is illustrate that the Strava segment matching algorithm is designed to deal with real GPS data recorded outside. When you confront it with data from a trainer it can have a meltdown.

Without examining your gpx files I can't tell you exactly what's going on but the reason could be that maybe strava have tweaked their algorithm, or TACX have tweaked their recording method, or you did something slightly different ... and out pops an unexpected result.
 
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OP
OP
BSRU

BSRU

A Human Being
Location
Swindon
I have pointed out it's changed very recently.
After some investigation it seems it might be Garmin causing the change.
Using TrainingPeaks, I compared the same ride before/after change, before the change no pauses are shown but now pauses are clearly visible.
Just noticed Garmin Connect does not show the pauses, but I think Garmin have changed/updated something.
 
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OP
OP
BSRU

BSRU

A Human Being
Location
Swindon
Simple answer is not to stop. If you're doing virtual rides, and you want to have comparability of segment times, why would you need to stop?
If you do really need to stop (for a pee, or whatever), why not do it on a descent?

On a ninety minute or more virtual HC climb sometimes stopping for a "nature break" is required, seems to be more common the more ancient I become.
 
OP
OP
BSRU

BSRU

A Human Being
Location
Swindon
Can't you just deduct the pauses from the total ride time. Quite easy to highlight the stops. It then tells you the duration

Or don't stop riding

Yes, I just use moving time which I save in my old spreadsheet which I used before relying on Strava.
Sometimes you just have to stop, like in the real world.
But in the real world none of my strava segments are more than twelve minutes long, unlike the very long virtual HC climbs on Tacx
 

scragend

Senior Member
It has always had different values for elapsed and moving time for real rides, I'm surprised it didn't for virtual rides.

TBH, it should include paused time, because every time you pause does give to a bit of rest.

Indeed - I always thought that was the whole point of showing elapsed time in the first place. Basically "I rode for 2 hours in a 2 hours 34 minutes window" or something like that.

If it always showed elapsed time and moving time as the same there would be no need for one of them.

Pausing a virtual ride to go for a break is no different from stopping at the side of the road to nip behind a bush. The pause should count as part of the elapsed time.
 

CXRAndy

Guru
Location
Lincs
My virtual rides(Strava recording ) don't have steps in their recordings. The data looks very much like my outdoor rides. I have a Tacx Neo 2
 
OP
OP
BSRU

BSRU

A Human Being
Location
Swindon
My virtual rides(Strava recording ) don't have steps in their recordings. The data looks very much like my outdoor rides. I have a Tacx Neo 2

You cannot see the pauses on Strava or Garmin Connect.
But on TrainingPeaks, if you change the x axis from distance to time they become visible.
Although before last week they were not visible for either distance or time on the x axis.
For outdoor rides the pauses have always been there.
It's not a major problem, just annoying as my old segment times do not include the pauses but the new ones do, making not a good comparison.
 
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