Like most of us I meticulously record every bike ride I do with a popular app among athletes called Strava. Strava is often described as the Facebook for athletes. It works by simply hitting the start button when going out for a run or bike ride and it will record a series of GPS coordinates until you hit stop again. Afterwards the athlete gets a report that shows a map with the route followed alongside with some graphs on speed, hearth rate and other data.
Strava offers an API that allows developers to build applications on top of their service using that data. The way it works is that a Strava user gives permission to a third party application that will in its turn allow the application to fetch the Strava data for that user.
I have always been interested in the heatmap project by Strava that shows where people bike frequently across the globe. For this project I thought it would be interesting to do something similar but then personalised for the athlete’s bike rides. The visualization above uses deck.gl and Mapbox to animate all recorded rides over time.
The code for this project is open and can be found on my GitHub.