TECH BACK CONTROL

Whether it’s chasing Strava kudos, disappearing into the virtual world of Zwift or measuring metrics with our gadgets, cycling in 2018 has never been more focused around technology and online social community. But is our appetite for it entirely healthy?

IIn his 2017 book, Irresistible: Why you are addicted to technology and how to set yourself free, New York University business and psychology professor Adam Alter details the scale of rampant behavioural addictions in our digital age. Going back to the ’60s, he writes, addiction ‘hooks’ were largely through substances, but we are now living through an era where hooks are everywhere – and far harder to avoid. Facebook, email, exercise trackers… It’s chalk and cheese given their relative potential for harm, but while an alcohol addict can take themselves out of situations that cause them to relapse relatively easily, how can, say, an email addict change their behaviour when their job likely revolves around it?

“Human behaviour is driven in part by a succession of reflexive costbenefit calculations that determine whether an act will be performed once, twice, a hundred times, or not at all,” writes Alter. “When the benefits overwhelm the costs, it’s hard not to perform the act over and over again, particularly when it strikes just the right neurological notes. A ‘like’ on Facebook and Instagram strikes one of those notes…”

Might the same be said of collecting kudos on cycling’s own social network Strava? It’s in a more minor key, but getting Strava kudos activates the same part of the brain, in the same way, as heroin, releasing the pleasure-causing chemical, dopamine.

As the Facebook ‘like’ offers unpredictable feedback dependent on the ‘quality’ of your post, the quest to hoover up Strava kudos depends on how your workout resonates with followers. If, despite the creative titles for your daily commute, the positive responses from followers are starting to dry up, you need to go bigger, harder, for longer. Double the length of your commute. Triple it. Do it all in the worst conditions possible. Everest a hill. Everest two hills. Find what gets your followers doling out the kudos and let the dopamine wash over you.

We’ve all heard stories of the lengths people go to in their pursuit of Strava gratification: driving out to a segment in favourable conditions gunning for a KOM; drafting a fast group and breaking clear before the summit to snatch the record; compulsively checking phone apps for alerts and uploading ride data before putting your helmet down. I was once admonished, in real life, by someone for not giving them the Strava kudos they felt their efforts warranted.

Beyond a joke

Strava ‘addiction’ is often talked about in a jokey way, but when does it turn into something more serious, both in terms of the rider enjoying their hobby and group rides not becoming strained by overly competitive behaviour?

The flip side, of course, between Strava and other social networks is that if you’re going to have an addictive behaviour, it may as well be one that gets you fit. Facebook, for example, sucks up your time, keeps you glued to your smartphone and gives you little back in return.

The reason why many people in Silicon Valley, who helped design Facebook and so on, have unplugged from social media is because they’re designed to be addictive. Its founder Mark Zuckerberg is a busy man but his product’s addictiveness is likely one reason why, according to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek in 2016, he has a 12-strong team managing his account. At least Strava co-founder Michael Horvath runs his own, activity-filled account on his own platform. Nobody is running and riding for him.

As with the ‘like’, Strava users are alerted to kudos with a little red symbol. According to a recent Guardian article, ‘Our minds can be hijacked,’ writer Paul Lewis was told by former Google employee turned critic of the tech industry, Tristan Harris. Facebook likes notifications were initially blue – but nobody used them. It was then switched to red, a trigger colour used as alarm signals. Few have been able get enough of it since.

Pressing the notification, Lewis writes, “exploits the same psychological susceptibility that makes gambling so compulsive: variable rewards. When we tap those apps with red icons, we don’t know whether we’ll discover an interesting email, an avalanche of ‘likes’, or nothing at all. It is the possibility of disappointment that makes it so compulsive.”

In Strava, is the notification alert kudos or a message, a new follower or an invite to pat someone on the back? Clicking is the only way to find out. Likewise, the alerts that say you’ve taken a KOM – you’re a robot if you say it doesn’t make you feel good.

For most people, the gamification of Strava – the game-like elements that encourage participation - provides nothing but helpful motivation to get active, with benefits far outweighing costs. “If you’re a couch potato who hates to exercise,” writes Alter in Irresistible, “a dose of motivation can only help”.

The problem comes for those people whose motivation is already up: “Addictive levers work by boosting motivation, so if motivation is already high there’s a good chance those levers will compromise well-being.”

Virtual Insanity?

Logging into Strava recently after a break, I was surprised by how many activities were being done through Zwift, the online virtual reality indoor turbo training game.

Zwift has become hugely popular in the road cycling community in recent years. Globally, in 2017, Zwift users logged 122,140,586 miles, enough to get to Mars and back twice, and doubling the figure from 2016. It has entered the mainstream like Strava.

Zwift might make for similarly compulsive playing as video games but gives far more than your thumbs a workout. You’re also not going to waste time playing into the small hours – you can only do so many sprints before your own decidedly organic console runs out of juice.

But is there, somewhere down the road, a risk of us losing our identity as outdoor roadies? When we can get all

Go bigger, harder, for longer. Find what gets your followers doling out the kudos and let the dopamine wash over you

the benefits of a group ride in the comfortable environs of our garage, might the threshold for what we can tolerate on an outdoor ride be lowered? Might virtual become our new reality?

Zwift insists it isn’t looking to replace outdoor cycling, but complement it. “We don’t want to pull people off their bikes and bring them inside,” insists Zwift’s PR manager Chris Snook. “We don’t want to create this virtual world where people are in basements pedalling away with a fan. We want Zwift to supplement cycling in the real world.”

The brand is always looking to connect with reality – hosting real-world events that bring together users for group rides (which they use to get feedback on the Zwift experience to drive future updates), as well as giving aspiring pros a chance to win a contract through the Zwift Academy.

The idea of community has become a huge draw of standard video games in recent times, and Zwift has been built by its user feedback as much as developer expertise. “It’s nice when you go to events and you get people who know each other and who hadn’t necessary met in real life,” says Snook.

Yes, my Strava feed was full of Zwift activities but Snook believes the game has merely encouraged people to upload their indoor workouts, when prior to its creation most turbo workouts were featureless and unmemorable.

He says it’s very apparent how popular Zwift is in cities, where “people have long working hours and the quality of riding isn’t great. They get their workout done and get on with life, then when it comes to their ride outdoors they’re fitter. They’re not frustrated because they’ve lost fitness through winter.” Indeed, Zwift users who ride further per ride can be found in Ontario, Vienna and Hamburg – three cities that have few rivals when it comes to bleak winters.

“Our aim is to complement it with riding outside,” says Snook. “I can say there’s nobody in our office who would choose to ride indoors rather than up Alpe d’Huez.”

It would be dystopia indeed were we to cut or abandon our road riding at the expense of the comforts of a virtual reality cycling game. Thankfully, that prospect feels remote, certainly on any big scale. While we might spurn the chance to ride in torrential winter weather in favour of Zwift’s cosseted virtual world, if it’s keeping us fit for the summer months, when we can make the most of our fabulous form, it’s no bad thing. You just need to worry when there’s a 10 per cent chance of showers in May and you’re opting for virtual reality.

Zwift may have a similarly immersive world to video games but its links back to the real world – far greater than most video games, far greater, even, than traditional turbo training – mean outdoor road riding has still got good legs in this new digital frontier.

Information overload

As Cycling Plus senior technical editor, Warren Rossiter, explains in the sidebar, the swath of cycling technology available in 2018 begs the question – how much information is too much? If there’s something that can’t be counted or measured you can bet someone is working on a solution. Is there still room for the simple, mindful act of riding a bike in our hyper-digital age?

To help answer this question I enlisted two self-confessed tech junkies to go cold turkey from gadgets and social media for several weeks, in an attempt to gauge just how reliant their cycling was on this technology.

Both Rupert Englander and Mike Ball had a list of gadgets and tech interests longer than my right arm. Sure, they used Garmins and Strava, like most people do, but most aspects of their cycling were being monitored by some device or app or another. Rupert works in tech, as Spotify’s Global Product marketing director, blogs about his cycling at themamil.co.uk, and even appears in a new documentary film called MAMIL - a rider more connected to tech you’re unlikely to find. Mike had suffered a heart attack three years ago, and uses devices and apps to track his progress and control his weight.

Some time before I’d even contacted him, Rupert had already made a concession to the distraction of his

When we can get all the benefits of a group ride in the comfort of our garage, might virtual become our new reality?

Garmin Edge unit by switching to a wrist watch: “The Edge has a big screen that is visible all the time without any movement needed… It was a distraction. I was focused on the Edge rather than the road.”

In truth, neither could wait for the experiment to end. In hindsight, it was flawed in the sense they had no way at all to track their rides – a simple mile-counting computer, as Warren discusses, would have been a better way to get back to basics. Without any feedback on their performance whatsoever, they were pedalling around aimlessly.

“Not tracking my rides felt akin to playing a football match with no goals, running a race with no finish line, or playing tennis with no scoring system. All slightly pointless,” reckoned Rupert. “As humans, we are competitive, either against each other or against ourselves, and having parameters with which we can measure our performance is quite a critical part of that experience.”

More interesting insight came from their Strava withdrawal. Neither believed they used the platform for validation on their performance from others. Rupert used it more as a mileage log, Mike as a genuine, enabling social tool - without it he’d been cut off from the group he’d formed through Strava. Rupert came to acknowledge that his whole post-ride routine involving Strava and VeloViewer “would take over my consciousness” for half an hour once he’d got back home. “All my wife would see is me getting back from my ride, coming in, grunting, barely acknowledging her existence and going straight to my desk.”

In terms of social media, he says “it’s a nice way to share experiences, as long as the recording of the experience doesn’t become the experience itself. Life is happening around us, not through the small screen.”

The experiment, he believes, will make him rethink how he goes about both. “As with almost anything I have analysed in my life recently, from training to drinking, to eating, to social media, the result seems to land at the same place – anything in moderation.”

Walk it back?

There’s a reason that the cycling technology industry is so lucrative – we can’t get enough of it. It can bring the cycling community together, push us towards our goals and keep us fit when life gets in the way. But whether it’s letting our egos take over with the quest for Strava gratification, favouring virtual reality over the real world or getting over-saturated on information, tech isn’t always a force for good. If you ever think you’ve gone too far down the tech rabbit hole, stripping it all back to basics will make you remember what got you hooked on this sport in the first place.