I just noticed that my strava_runtime goal pulls the elapsed time from Strava instead of using moving time.
This is different from what I would have expected and I would personally prefer using moving time.
Example (pics below): I went for run-commute home from playing squash the other day. Got lost in some urban garden twice, so the run took me about an hour (57 minutes) but part of that was just standing there, looking at my phone to find my way. Strava’s moving time (49 minutes) is much closer to my true exercise time (I feel it underestimates the ground truth by a small margin while elapsed time often overestimates by large margin) and works quite well for me. Now when I’m tracking my time spent running, I am more interested in active (i.e. moving) time than time elapsed.
So I would propose that beeminder pulls “moving time” from Strava rather than “elapsed time”. Or even better: Just like it’s possible to track “effort weighted time” right now (a beeminder custom metric), you could make it possible to choose between “moving time” and “elapsed time” when setting up the goal.
One reason beeminder might be using elapsed time right now is that it reads data not from the Strava activities but from the raw files - so it just takes the last time in the GPX file minus the starting time? But it covers manual Strava activities as well, so I think it should be possible to get parameters directly from a Strava activity.
How do others feel about this?
I would love if there was a short discussion if this is a useful and doable suggestion!
I haven’t used Zapier yet, found it a bit messy in the beginning. Plus, I think this is almost a bug since I see no reason to use “elapsed time” in the official integration. So it would still be cool to hear if anyone else wants this; and from the beeminder guys if that would be an option and easy to fix.
Agreed, this seems to almost count as a bug since Moving Time seems like the obviously more meaningful metric! I’m guessing it’s an easy change (except for the part where we probably need to email everyone and warn them!) but click to encourage us to prioritize it!
I assume there is no way of retroactively changing the metric on an existing goal from elapsed time to moving time, right? (Probably that shouldn’t be possible for weaselly reasons, just checking.)
Pretty sure that you can’t do that as a mortal. Emailing support would be the way for anyone who wants to make such a change to the data field or source of an integration.
Also, it’s not going to be retroactive. A good chance that recent history would get re-synch’d but proper historical history would be untouched.
to encourage us to prioritize it!