Stravasshole : an individual Strava-ing at the expense of common courtesy.

Strava is fun and I like to go "Strava-ing on the weekends". For those unfamilier with this term, Strava is a the ability to track your rides with GPS AND (most importantly) compete not in real-time with other riders of the road or trail for the fastest time. There are other products that provide rich GPS ride tracking like Ride with GPS and MapMyRide is getting into KOM's as well but Strava isn't about it's GPS technical excellence it's all about public display of winning. But like any disruptive technology that hits the market like Facebook, Twitter or camera phones, bad uses arise and with Strava these people are called Stravassholes.

Recently on MTBR Forums a Post about Stravassholes was made

So over the last year or so the rides tracked on Strava here in the FR have blown thru the roof, especially in the Golden area. the lookout road climb had always been a biggie but now there are tons of UH and DH segments on dirt all over Chimney, WR, NTM, STM, etc. Initially I was hooked, I was riding better when I knew I was on the clock. Since however, realized its clearly a double edge sword. Was ascending last week, some ***** comes whipping around, saw me and shouted "STRAVA! coming thru"...didn't bother to yield and blew by. not a huge deal, wide section of the trail, but got me wondering what the FR will be like when the entire FR is full of Stravons killling each other for the KOM. oh well.

Are we becoming Stravassholes with this new technology?

I posted this question to Facebook recently and got some interesting feedback, as one person said, Assholes are Assholes, Strava just gave them a platform to amplify it.

But I like Strava as it allows us to do something not so easily done before and to use it in innovative ways like create a race without ever having a race or easily see how my climbing or descending compares to my peers or just for myself and how I perform on my weekly personal hard ride day. With tools like Strava one could create a entire race series for a Summer and never have to get a permit, have insurance or get it sanctioned, how cool would that be?! It can also be very disheartening at times like when I blew a personal record on NCAR last week only to find out that put in me 39th place (I'm not even going to try to beat the downhill segment).

If you haven't tried Strava or any of the Strava like products (Ride with GPS, MapMyRide, or MyTracks (Google)) than be cautious, it can be addictive and if you have any bit of asshole in you then it will get amplified and your inner Stravasshole will come out.