Steph on Strava
I’ve been sitting with this data for a while and that’s not really like me — so, sorry, Steph! Also, PS - this post contains affiliate links.
If you have read any of my 2021 blog posts, you know that one of my resolutions was to build up my Tableau Public profile which will serve as an online portfolio of my work outside of the work I do for my real job at MS. I’m not naive enough to think that I know all that I need to know with regards to Tableau or data analysis, so this gives me an opportunity to develop my skills with different kinds of data. I recruited all of my data from my streaming services but I also wanted to work on other people’s data. Naturally, I made Steph give me her Strava data because I knew she would have a shit ton of workouts. So here we go, let’s get into it.
Per Wikipedia, ‘Strava is an internet service for tracking human exercise which incorporates social network features. It is mostly used for cycling and running using GPS data. Strava uses a freemium model with some features only available in the paid subscription plan.’ It has integrations with all kinds of applications such as Peloton, which we will see in Steph’s data. 2020 was a wild year and we had to change a lot of our habits. I remember when I lived in Manhattan and would wake up at the crack of dawn to meet Steph at Equinox for a workout before work. I kind of miss those days! Fun fact about Steph, she almost always has two breakfasts. One pre- and one post-workout. Anyone that knows her will tell you that she is a workout machine and her data will only support that.
If you want, here is the video of me explaining everything
Voila…. Here it is, well the first page at least. I like to keep overview/landing/home pages pretty clean and simple with not a lot of noise. Only the most important things that I find in the data usually. In this case, I wanted to have aggregate numbers (yearly totals for 2020) but also wanted to see the trends for context. Steph spent 349 hours working out through Strava! That’s almost 15 full days… That is mind-blowing to me. Especially considering I spend such a large amount of time with her and my totals wouldn’t even come close to that.
Steph also wears an Apple watch and they (Apple Fitness) tracks by having 3 daily goals (iykyk), one of which is an exercise “ring”. While this dashboard shows “only” 210 days, this was only on the workouts that her Strava app tracked. Steph actually reached her exercise goal on her Apple watch 366/366 days in 2020. Wild.
Another interesting metric is on the bottom row— miles covered. The caveat here is that the Peloton strength workouts don’t track distance as well as others such as yoga. Regardless, it’s still a significant amount of distance for one individual to cover. That first big spike comes from a combination of a couple of things, the main one being that our tennis club opened up again at the end of May, and at the time, she wasn't comfortable being in Ubers, so she took transportation into her own hands — or legs, I guess. Steph biked from Manhattan to Queens multiple times a week to play tennis and hang out at the club. I’m not gonna expose where she lives but for reference, here is what she was doing: Lower Manhattan to Forest Hills
8-10 miles each way may not seeeeeeeeem like a lot, but doing it once before playing multiple hours of tennis and then again at the end of the day WHILE battling aggressive NY drivers, is quite impressive if you ask me.
Let’s dive into the activities that Steph tracked on Strava.
So typically in the “drill down” page, I like to do just that — drill down. Get into a little bit more detail than what was on the first page and almost always to give more context to the metrics displayed on the main page. You know, to “connect the dots”. Ha Ha Ha. Get it? Connect the dots because of the bottom chart on that last picture? God, I love data jokes.
Let’s start with the visual on the top left. In Tableau, it’s called a highlight table, but it’s commonly known as a heat map. Across the top we have the days of the week and running down the left we have the months of the year. It’s always cool to see volume over time like in chronological order, but sometimes it’s more contextual to see it by days of the week. Do we spot a trend on Mondays? Weekend days? In Steph’s case, we see that we see a darker cluster there in April/May & in the middle of the week. If this was anybody else’s data, I would be shocked by this finding, but knowing her, I know that a majority of her workouts are not on the Strava app such as platform tennis or regular tennis, which typically takes place on the weekends. Taking racquet sports out of the equation, I’m not surprised to see more workouts in the middle of the week. However, you may notice that the difference between the middle of the week and the other days is rarely more than 1 or 2.
Though these heat maps give you a different look at things, sometimes a regular ole bar chart helps you see the trend over time. On the top right, we see the same trend that we saw across most of the charts on the landing page. A higher number of activities in April (got peloton), May & June (club reopened + biking across NYC), a dip in the summer months (activities outside Strava + travel). No surprises there.
The last chart shows the number of activities over time by activity type. It’s worth noting that some activities overlap the different categories, but overall, the trend is obviously the same. I know people love line charts and pie charts, but we have to be careful with how many different categories we are displaying. Best practice is to only use these types of charts when there are 3-5 categories. Stacked bars are better when using only 1-2 categories, otherwise, it may be tough to notice the difference across time. Remember that visualizations are supposed to help you get your point across, to help readers understand, not to confuse them. When in doubt, keep it simple! You really can never go wrong with that rule of thumb, in anything.
I’m excited to revisit Steph’s data at the end of the year and see how her workout habits have changed. In a perfect world, we’ll be back to normal at some point this year but that’s maybe a bit too optimistic. Who knows when we’ll get back to normal or even if we will ever go back to that version of normal. As we know, the only thing constant is change. One of the clearest lessons of 2020 for me was that we don’t really need all of the things we think we need. For example, fancy gyms, nice dinners, in-person shopping, multiple trips a year. They all became really “nice to haves” but certainly not essentials, as much as some of us think they are. We were all locked up in quarantine and stay at home orders, one way or another, and we all showed how creative we can be to make do with what we have and what we do with that. In the words of the great Arthur Ashe, “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” Things may not be perfect these days and they may be faaaaar from getting back to normal, but I promise that there is always a way to make things work and there is always light at the end of the tunnel.
In the spirit of COVID and staying home as much as possible- Let’s talk about drizzly. I became a Drizly affiliate which means that if you shop through them you would be supporting me and my blog <3 Steph and I order from Drizly all the time and she’s actually the one that put me on to it. The other day when I was spiraling over facetime with her in between meetings, she sent me two bottles of my favorite Cab. I drank the first bottle that same afternoon. So, if you’re going to drink this weekend, might as well order it through the link above and support me while you’re at it. Ok that was my spiel, byeeeeee.
