Author: Ian

Recently Strava’s API for getting Friends has stopped working. This hasn’t only affected Crickles: numerous other app developers are reporting the same problem. There is no information about this on the Strava developers site, which still reports the same protocol for accessing Friends data, so there is no way of knowing if it’s an unintended bug or a planned removal of functionality. Strava are not replying to Support queries on the topic.

Whether/how Friends-style comparisons will be supported if Strava don’t fix their API remains to be seen. Please let me know if you have views on its desirability.

UPDATE – Strava are not restoring this functionality hence the Friends groupings in Crickles are, for the time being, stuck with only the friends known as of the date before this was withdrawn.

Thanks, Ian

Prominent amongst the latest batch of enhancements to Crickles is the introduction of user credentials: you now need a password to access the Navigator. The log-in screen looks something like this

On your first visit, you’ll only see the Username (Strava ID): field at first. The Strava ID that is needed is not the email address or Facebook ID that you use to log onto Strava but the number that Strava uses to key your data. In my case, for example, it’s 301194, as in the figure. To find your Strava ID, go to the Strava website and find “My Profile”. On the Strava website, it’s currently found in the pull-down menu next to your photo on the top right of the screen.

Once you have selected this, the top of the browser window will look like this:

You can see from the figure that the Strava ID (301194 in my case) is at the end of the URL in the address bar.

Once you enter your Strava ID, if you haven’t yet authorised Crickles to access your Strava data a link will appear where you can do this. Alternatively, you can do so at:

signup.crickles.org

Then, if you haven’t got a password yet, hit the Request password button. A password will be emailed to you and it should arrive more or less instantly.

If you wish, once you’ve logged on you can create your own password. As well as being potentially more memorable, this is also more secure. Although the password generated by Crickles is encrypted, it has necessarily passed through email servers en route to you, unlike a password that you choose for yourself.

You change password using this screen:

You get to it by checking the Change password? checkbox in the side panel. If you’re on the screen and decide that you don’t want to create a new password, simply uncheck the box. Once you’ve changed the password you’ll need to re-enter it to log in.

After you have logged in you should not usually need to do so again on the same device. (If, though, you have disabled all cookies in your browser you’ll need to log in every time.) The way that credentials are shared between devices, and whether and how passwords are cached, will depend upon your device, your browser and your settings.

Significantly, no one can now see your data on Crickles without logging in as you. Your Strava Friends who are also on Crickles can compare various aggregate CSS measures and compare charts of activities that have not marked as Private on Strava, but the detailed information that you can see is now just your own.

Crickles Activity Charts has up until now (only) been available as a standalone app at charts.crickles.org. From today, Crickles Charts are integrated in the Navigator and the separate app has been retired. Here’s an example of how it looks now:

For the time being, this functionality joins HR Zones and Regularity as a beta feature and thus requires a log-in.

Functionally, the only significant change is that the set of Athletes whose activities you can choose to chart against your own is now picked from amongst your Strava friends who are on Crickles rather than the entire Crickles population. If you need a refresher, a description of the functionality as it was before is available here.

Hopefully, now that charts are integrated with the rest of the Navigator functionality, you’ll find it more convenient.

You may have noticed on Strava that there is quite an extensive list of Sports into which activities can be categorised. Here, for no reason other than curiosity, is a chart showing relatively how many of each activity we have on Crickles:

Since the number of activities in each Sport ranges from Rides, which is in six figures, down to Handcycles, for which we only have one, I’ve used a log scale.

Cardiac Stress Score can be calculated for any of these Sports in which a heart rate monitor is used (and estimated imprecisely even if one isn’t).

UPDATE: the algorithm for calculating CSS in the absence of heart rate data has been significantly enhanced since the time of writing.

There is a new feature on the Navigator for everyone on the BETA programme: you can now see your current training zones. The tab structure has been changed slightly so that when you’re not logged in the tab bar now looks like this:

Notice in particular the MORE option on the right. When you choose this you get the log-in screen that takes your BETA programme password screen. When you log in, the tab bar changes to this:

You can see that the HR Zones and Regularity tabs have appeared and I’ve selected the HR Zones tab. This shows my current training zones as calculated from the Crickles estimate of my current Lactate Threshold Heart Rate (LTHR). It also shows the date at which the zones were last changed – such changes are triggered from time to time in response to athlete activity data.

If you don’t yet have a BETA log in and would like one, please read this post and then, if you’re happy to proceed, send me an email requesting a password along with your date of birth.

Separately from the BETA programme, the standard Seasonal tab has also changed: Zone 5 was previously spilt into Z5a, Z5b and Z5c. These have now been consolidated for easier zone-to-zone and quarter-to-quarter comparisons:

The Relative CSS report – which is at the time of writing is the landing page on the Navigator – shows how the chosen athlete’s totalled Cardiac Stress accrued over the period defined by the Date range compares with others. This total CSS is a product of three factors:

1. The number of activities
2. The duration of each activity
3. The cardiac intensity of each activity.

The first of these is straightforward. Information on items 2 and 3 is available on the Relative profile report. Here’s how it now looks:

In this case “Athlete” is me. The chart on the left shows how the duration of my activities over the chosen period (the last six weeks) compares with that of others, with the y-axis being scaled in hours. I’m in green. The widest part comes at about half an hour, indicating that more of my activities have been of this duration than any other. By contrast, other athletes – the blue shape – are doing a far greater proportion of their activities over a period of 1-2 hours. Unlike others, I have no activities – zero width – around the two hour mark over this period.

It’s important to note that the number of activities (item 1 on the list of three factors above) is not reflected here at all – from this chart alone it’s impossible to know whether I’m doing three times as many or half as many total hours as others. This only shows the proportion of activities at each duration.

The chart on the right shows the distribution of cardiac intensity. Again, the chosen athlete (me again) is in green and others are in blue. From this I can see that for me the widest part – the intensity at which I most frequently exercised – is at about 87% whereas for others it lies at about 82%. On the other hand, some other athletes have exercised at over 100% intensity in this period and I haven’t. (100% is not a magic value – you can think of it, approximately, as exercising at or above your established Lactate Threshold Heart Rate.)

Like most of the reports on the Navigator, it responds to your choices for Athlete, Date range and Group – Group defines who is counted as “Others”.

This form of chart is likely to be unfamiliar to most people. However, compared to the old visualisation, it more clearly shows the relative distributions and has less risk of misleading at the extremes. Once you get used to it, it’s an intuitive plot that conveys its information nicely.

Following some early feedback from the Beta, a couple of new features have been added to the Navigator.

First, to make the Navigator quicker and easier to find, there’s a new big green button on the home page of this website:

(Depending upon your browser, you can probably see the picture of the buttons above as well as the actual buttons.) Old School access is still, of course, available using the web address navigator.crickles.org.

Second, when you’re using the Navigator there is now a small block of help text pertaining to each report. As in this example, this appears in the side panel and changes according to the tab that you’re looking at (in this case Fit-Fat):

General help on the use of the Navigator, such as how to reset the Date range quickly, is still available here.

You may have noticed recently that there is a new report on the Navigator that requires a password, and that a few of the posts on this website are now password protected. This reflects some significant changes to Crickles that are being released initially in a BETA programme. If you’d like to participate and check out the new features please read on…

To access the BETA functionality

Send an email requesting access to ian@crickles.org.

I will need your Date of Birth – this will enable us to factor in age into the new analysis.

This aside, you are only asked to agree to:

1. Accepting the confidentiality terms;
2. Giving me feedback;
3. Acknowledging the limitations of the beta.

This is all described further in the Mechanics of the beta section below.

Please do try it out!

Here’s what’s in the beta:

More analysis of heart rate data

One of the main features of the BETA is a new Regularity report. This gives a new type of analysis on your heart rate data. It also gives some analysis on the “strap crap” that is filtered out by the Crickles data cleaning routines.

For those on the programme, a full description is available here.

Just your data

To date, all of the analysis on the Navigator has been available to everyone on an “all see all” basis. The new report is potentially more confidential in character and so each athlete can see only his or her own data. This is why we now require a password to access that report. In future, we may password-protect more information, such as FTP curves – subject to what people would prefer. However, peer comparisons are super-useful and we’ll keep these as a prominent feature.

Strava Friends

To date, you can compare yourself to others using the Group dropdown. However, apart from the gender sub-selection that this offers, this isn’t useful for most of the Crickles population. On the beta, once you’re logged in you can now choose Strava Friends from the Group dropdown. This then enables you to compare yourself specifically against your Strava friends on the relevant reports (Relative CSS, Relative Profile, All-in and This week). This is much more meaningful – and you can still compare yourself to the overall Crickles cohort and your gender group.

Mechanics of the beta

1. Please email me as above to request a password. All passwords are encrypted in use and cannot be hacked in plain from a web server. However your password is not encrypted “in flight” when I send it to you. If you are concerned about security I can text you your password instead of emailing it, and if you’re very worried I can give it you by phone.
2. At this stage I haven’t built a mechanism for you to choose or re-set your own password. Also, the password setting process is still manual and it may take me a while to get round to sending out yours if a lot of people ask for them.
3. As far as I’m aware, this new analysis, and indeed some of the existing analysis, is unique and unavailable anywhere else. While I’m continuing to develop it, please treat it as commercially sensitive – for example, don’t email Strava describing it and asking for them to copy it!
4. To log in, choose the Regularity report, which will throw the log-in screen (unless you’re already logged in). The User ID you need is simply your Strava ID (e.g. mine is 301194). You can see this on the Athlete dropdown in brackets. Once you’ve logged in you’ll be returned to the main page (Relative CSS) and will need to choose Regularity again to see it.
5. While this functionality is still in beta, you can always escape back to the current way that the Navigator works by refreshing the page. This will log you out. On Safari at least, the browser caches your ID and password so you don’t need to re-enter them. The iPhone doesn’t do this – when we move beyond beta I intend to build this into Crickles so that you will rarely need to re-enter your credentials.
6. You will also get a general-purpose password for accessing the protected posts on crickles.org.

If you sign up to try out the beta, please could you give me feedback on the new features. It would also be super-helpful to know:

• what you use Crickles for;
• what you never use;
• roughly how often you look at the Navigator;
• whether you ever use Crickles Activity Charts;
• what further improvements would make Crickles most helpful.