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From the FasterSkier archive — posts syndicated from athletes’ and coaches’ own blogs between 2004 and 2012, kept online as published. Current coverage is at fasterskier.com.

Tag: Virtual Event

  • Virtual Event Hosting: the Strava Club Recipe

    Virtual Event Hosting: the Strava Club Recipe

    Athletes skiing at the Snow Farm in New Zealand.

    There are many kinds of virtual events, and many ways to run them. Look here for context and alternatives.

    This is a simple and free solution to running a temporally distanced event on a fixed course.

    Summary: Create an invitation-only club on Strava. Create a segment. When the event concludes, select the club from the segment leaderboard options to view results.

    Advantages:

    • Free.
    • Low effort for OC.
    • Strava provides tools to detect groups skiing together if Covid compliance is necessary for your region.

    Disadvantages:

    • Requires participants to have a GPS (phone, watch, etc.) and some mild geek skills to create a Strava account.
    • Results are public.
    • The leaderboard only shows the best time for each Strava account.
    • If the segment is a commonly skied route, the results board will be cluttered with old results. If this happens, the OC will spend way too much time hunting through the Strava club feed for actual results.
    • Sharing results in a way that reveals the connection between a person’s name and their Strava ID breaks Strava’s privacy rules. In some jurisdictions that have privacy laws, it may be necessary to use Strava IDs instead of names in the posted results.

    The Recipe

    Ingredients:
    • One Strava account to be used by the OC.
    • A trails system.
    • Optional: A registration system to decide who is invited to the Strava Club.
    Steps:
    1. Figure out your pandemic compliance plan. Here are some starting points.
    2. Using a web browser (not the app), create a new club, and set it to invitation-only.
    3. Optional: If you want to compile registrations in your usual registration system, create that first.
      1. In the pandemic, this may be essential to having registrants legally agree to a virtual waiver, the safety protocols, and to verify eligibility for regional travel restrictions, etc.
      2. This is a great way to charge an entry.
      3. Remember to ask for the participant’s Strava ID in order to add them to the club.
    4. Determine one or more segments that will serve as the designated racecourse. Make your segments private while testing. Strava fanatics will ski your course as soon as it appears to get their moment of glory.
    5. Find a way to make your race loop unusual. Most trail systems are littered with existing Strava segments, which combined with the heat map data, will help narrow down options. Some ideas:
    6. Include a loop around a building.
      1. If your stadium has fixed objects (trees, outhouses, stands, etc), loop around a few.
      2. Add a side circuit to a popular loop.
      3. One segment that is the entire course is probably essential. If the course has multiple laps, Strava recognizes this nicely. If you have one and two-lap versions, create two segments. Note that the fastest lap from the two-lap participants appears in your one lap leaderboard.
      4. Spice things up with some fun segments. A short steep climb, the wildest downhill, a 100m sprint on the flat at the top of a hill.
      5. Make it possible for people to discover your event, or no one will enter.
      6. Make the event segments public just before the event goes live.
      7. Getting results can be easy, especially right after the event ends. Viewing the segment that defines the course in the app or a browser allows you to look at different leaderboards. As soon as someone finishes, the club will be listed as a filter option. Choosing the club creates an instant result sheet.
        1. When the leaderboard doesn’t give you what you need (a participant skied the course last year and only that time is visible, GPS errors eliminated participants, etc), the plan B is hunting through the Strava club activity feed to find the missing finishes.
        2. Remember that if you share participant names and times in the results sheet, anyone can use Strava to find the matching Strava IDs. This matters in some jurisdictions.

    The author has run three test segments, one club, and a few dozen volunteer skiers to figure out a solution. Here are some of the lessons.

    • If a skier skis to the start of the segment with their watch already tracking, slips into the bathroom for a few minutes and then returns to ski the segment, the segment time will include the bathroom visit. Recommend that people start tracking when they start the event segment and not as part of a longer ski.
    • If there are multiple distances or courses on the same day, making a Strava club for each distance is advised.
    • Sometimes what seems like a unique and unusual route is already popular. Strava won’t show how many people have already skied a route until an hour or two after the segment is made public.
    • Strava’s value to users is all about winning your training days. This means the leaderboard it creates emphasizes time and pace. This can be a problem for participation-style events.
    • If your local pandemic rules set group size limits: It is easy to detect groups that start or finish together. Detecting groups that formed mid-course is more time-consuming. Asking people to start their Strava recording at the start line and end it at the finish helps with this. It also helps prevent warm-up and cool down loops out of the recorded time.
  • Hosting a Virtual Ski Event

    Hosting a Virtual Ski Event

    Virtual Race Courses Look Different: An action photo from a time trial at Sovereign Lake during the pandemic. 20 racers spread out over three hours, no officials, no spectators.

    COVID19 has brought many changes to the nordic world. In many places, we can still ski. Some people can travel, some cannot. Some people live near snow, some don’t. There is no one size fits all solution to having fun while the pandemic rages, but there are a lot of potential solutions to specific needs.

    The race organizers among us know how to host traditional large group races. If that is allowed, you just need to build your bubble plus testing regime, and off you go. That’s certainly more difficult than it sounds. For the rest of us with smaller budgets, outside-the-box thinking is mandatory.

    This is the beginning of a series exploring recipes for hosting your own virtual ski event. We are all learning as we go and the only FasterSkier staffer who knows everything about everything is too busy studying medicine, which means we need your help to build a better resource. Tell us about event types we have overlooked, better ways to categorize events, solutions that worked for your running or mountain biking club, or even just ways to use the solutions we have already found. Write up your own solution or event and let us all learn from you. (You can leave a comment or email gerry@fasterskier.com directly.)

    Most of the examples cited below can be done with self-timing or GPS timing. GPS makes it harder to cheat, but it isn’t that hard. The easiest way to stop cheating is to reduce the awards. Sadly, some people will cheat to get their name on top of a digital list; if that is your biggest problem in 2020, it is time to throw a (virtual) party.

    For some ideas on how to convert the ideas and examples below into your event, see Virtual Event Hosting: Things to Think About.

    The collection of recipes will grow as the community adds ideas. Just as there is more than one oatmeal cookie recipe on the internet, there can be multiple event recipes based on the same tools. As with any recipe book, both the ideas and the detailed steps are just a starting point, an inspiration to making something your own.

    Types of Event:

    With real examples where we have found them and explanations of how some events were created.

    • Pick your own start time on a fixed course.
      • This could be a Strava segment or any specific route that everyone skis.
      • Caledonia Nordic has announced the Grand Tour, built on zone4.
      • Create a Strava club, make a segment for each race, and invite the registered entrants to join the club. Here’s a recipe.
      • Have races scan a QR code to record times using WebScorer.
    • Pick your own course, single sport.
      • Many running series did this over the summer. Run at least 5km anywhere in the world and upload a photo of your gps watch or your gpx file as proof.
      • WebScorer has a blog with one solution here for self-reported results.
    • Pick your own course, multi-sport.
      • For visitors who can’t visit, selected distances with sport options to suit the areas your participants live in. 
      • The Kangaroo Hoppet was in lockdown in August with the trails closed. People chose one of the distances and a sport they could do at home. As Australians in some states could only go outside for two hours, the distance could be done over multiple days. The road cyclists dominated the result sheet, but the roller skiers had the best photos.
      • The Merino Muster had both a virtual event and an on-snow event. The on-snow portion was postponed a few weeks for safety reasons, only local skiers could attend. This wasn’t as polished as the Hoppet, possibly because the OC had two parallel events with conflicting demands.
    • Club/Group Challenges
      • A participation based competition between areas or organizations. Kilometres or hours are easy to do. Even miles if you live in Myanmar, Liberia, or what was that third non-metric country again. Some form of per capita ranking will be needed if there is a large disparity in sizes.
      • Nordiq Canada and zone4.ca are creating a kilometre-based challenge for all of Canada that will start in January. More detail on how they are building this is forthcoming, but here is a FAQ from zone4.ca while you are waiting.
      • Nordiq Canada has partnered with iSKI and FIS for a kids challenge, also starting in January. More information pending after this initiative is announced.
    • Ski every trail in the system.
      • Difficulty depends on how big your trail system is, but it is a mental and physical challenge to find the shortest route the covers every trail and finishes where it started. Mathematicians call this kind of problem NP-complete, which means you have to try every possible route to be certain you found the shortest. At this author’s home system, there are millions of possible routes, and the shortest path to ski all 50km of trail is likely to be about 75km long.
    • Almost Real
      • Some places have the pandemic under control and have more freedom to get together for almost normal ski racing. Take my Covid expert’s advice to ‘be kind’ and celebrate those who have more opportunity than you.
      • The Great Bear Chase has changed to have smaller waves and more of them.