We had a good discussion on Strava about counting elevation. Currently it does not count your elevation but does count mileage.
Personally I would like the option to include elevation or not.
IMHO the miles are the same, but I count elevation as true gaining of altitude. I can “shift” down to simulate a climb or my smart trainer can do it for me but my body is not reaching less oxygen rich air like it would if I was truly climbing.
No big deal to me, I just would create a whole separate account for my zwift activities as I want my elevation data for the year to be legit actually climbing data.
Valid elevation data from Zwift will start showing up on Strava next week. If you’d rather strava not count that elevation for now, you can go flag your ride as a trainer ride, however then you’ll lose leaderboard capabilities on Strava.
I think down the road we can add the option to not include that data, but it could be a while before that makes it in.
PS, I think you can ask Strava to “correct” elevation, and in that case it’ll set it all to the altitude of Jarvis Island, which is flat. So there’s one option to nullify the altitude if you want.
It appears that Strava has a 2nd layer of elevation correction, so I have to retract what I said. We’re working with strava to figure out this 2nd hurdle to get our elevation data “respected”, as Strava’s algorithms correctly detect that it doesn’t match reality. No ETA on this as most of them are away for holiday now.
As of 1/13/2015 elevation still doesn’t show up. As for the original question, I can understand not wanting to include elevation, but another thing to consider is that without elevation, the reported speeds wouldn’t make any sense. Right now it looks like I was going 50MPH on a flat and there is no way I could ever do that. I guess that brings up a related issue: in the real world I would never feel comfortable going 50MPH down hill… Definitely makes Zwift enjoyable and the Strava integration adds a cool factor, but I’m just not sure what to make of it yet.
Please (Zwift or Strava) remove the elevation from STRAVA. It’s mucking up my stats. As primarily a MTB rider, elevation is THE stat that matters most to me…
You can crank on a trainer. You can spin on a trainer. But you can’t CLIMB on a trainer. And a power equivalent just isn’t climbing.
Yes, I outputted XXX watts.
Yes, I spun the pedals at XXX cadence
Yes, the trainer (and my wheel) spun at XXX miles per hour (<— though I understand this is going to be wonky in Zwift due to the algorithm calculating speed)
Yes, my wheels rolled XXX distance.
NO, I did not climb anything.
And, aside from the arbitrary hills in Zwift (made up or based on a real profile) there is NO truth behind the elevation.
Even the miles are inaccurate so there is no real way to mimic a true ride, I compared my power vs garmin/powermeter vs Kinetic trainer and the miles on Zwift are higher with the coasting/descents, etc. I just select trainer ride every time now so my elevation goes to zero.
On Strava Desktop, go to Training, then click My Activities. Click edit on the activity and then in the bottom right click the box for Trainer. The elevation will go to zero.
Workaround: disconnect Strava from Zwift, upload manually AFTER you run it through fitfiletools.com to:
a) change device (to any garmin GPS instead of Zwift)
b) strip fields (elevation and/or location)
Alternate approach:
Use a garmin to record your speed, time, power, cadence, HR, and upload that to Strava as a trainer ride (and keep Zwift stats totally separate and in-game)