“Who doesn't go for a 149-day-long swim each morning:” Strava users call out cheaters

Some users' statistics on Strava made others question how legit these numbers are.

One way people like to stay motivated in sports is by joining challenges. Often, fitness tracking apps, such as Strava, invite users to monthly group challenges tailored for runners, cyclists, swimmers, hikers, and more.

While the idea of these dares is to encourage users to improve themselves and their training, some want to reach the leaderboard at all costs, even if it means cheating.

This phenomenon isn’t new, even though there are already ways to check if someone is forging their results.

One user online decided to ask why the platform itself does nothing to prevent such users from messing with the challenge.

The Redditor shared a screenshot from what seems to be a swimming challenge where the leading profile included suspicious statistics.

“Theres only 730 hours in a month, we are 288 hours in and yet some people of clocked thousands of hours.....,” wrote the user. Their shared screenshot shows that the profile already has more than 3000 hours.

“It’s mystifying why they won’t add simple checks, like whether a user is logging more than 24 hours a day of activities or if their pace exceeds Olympic records!” wrote another user.

“Ah yes, who doesn't go for a 149-day-long swim each morning,” joked one Redditor with the original poster saying: “I think Im slacking. Strava always shames me.”

Strava - are you blind????
byu/GJGT inStrava

While more discrepancies were found with the statistics, users agreed that this could be simply flagged, but also stated that “this is Strava's job, and it just makes leaderboards mostly a joke. The only leaderboard worth looking at is the one where you compete against yourself.”

One of the Strava employees also joined the discussion by stating, “We’re not blind, but we are committed to cleaning up our Challenge leaderboards of egregious cases like these.” They proceeded to share that the company will soon apply its new auto-flagging system in Challenges.

However, some people weren’t convinced as they shared that this has been an ongoing problem for years.

While Strava lets users report cases of cheating, how does one know someone is messing with the results?

Things that might indicate that a person is cheating are inconsistent pace and splits, weird timeframes, anomalies in GPS data, when it shows a person walking or running in places where it shouldn’t be possible, phony elevation gain, and corrected or incomplete data.