My friends, for the love of God and all that is Holy, there’s a new way to lose friends and shun yourself…  It’s called Digital Doping.

I can remember a while back, a fella who commented on the most popular post I’ve ever written (How I Got Fast – A Noob’s Guide to a 23-mph Average) accusing me of lying about the fact that I’d done rides averaging 23-mph.  He required that I supply him my Strava info as proof, because obviously, if it didn’t happen on Strava, it didn’t happen.  Instead, I gave up some data from my Endomondo account (because I didn’t use Strava back then).  I hammered him pretty hard, too, for being an @$$hole about it.

This year, our B Group managed 23-mph, or very close to it, several times on Tuesday night – and I’m hooked up to Strava now, so the rides actually happened (thank goodness).  Long story short, I was pretty hot that the person who left the comment challenged me to begin with.  After all, who would lie about such a thing?!  You’d have to be a loser of epic proportions… and then I read there’s a site out there that scrubs and boosts one’s Strava data.

My friends, if you’ve come to a point where you’ve gotta artificially boost your stats on Strava, hang up your cycling shoes and melon protector for a minute, get your ass on a mountain bike on a trail somewhere and take a few hours to remember why you ride a bike in the first place.

While it is fun to write posts about what it feels like to be in a pace-line that averages 23-mph (and it’s even better to be able to be one of the horses of that group), eventually you’re going to have to back those bogus stats up in a club setting and “I just don’t have the legs tonight” isn’t going to cut it when you get dropped in the first five miles.

It’s better to be honest about the phone book full of people who can beat you than to lie and have it come out that it’s actually two phone books full of people who can beat you.