Looking to see where/how i can improve and basically where i got dropped mostly in CX and MTB races. I’ve used Flyby before and sometimes you can really see where your competition dropped ya and where you were reeling in the competition.
I just did a CX race though that had some climbing/descending and it was really hard to see where i could improve or strengths.
Does anyone have any tips on using Flyby or any other tools within strava to decipher this?
In my experience (at least around where I live/race) Strava effectively killed fly-by when they changed the default privacy setting to off rather than on. I understand their reasoning behind it but a significant percentage of users don’t know/don’t care and haven’t gone into settings to turn it back on. This has resulted in pretty minimal fly-by activity on most rides/races for me
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I used to use FlyBy to evaluate my performance. Especially compared to people I race with often. If I can see that 3 of them were faster in a race and one is slower, I know the one is an anomaly and look at those three to see where I am slipping. Things like that.
Strava killed that, and has actually in time become worthless to me. I only use it because people who follow me started messaging me when I stopped posting because they liked my rides 
^ this.
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The Fly-By was a great tool with way too many flaws!
I like that i could look for people in my area that I pass (or they pass me) during a wo.
Maybe recruit them to the racing team…
But it also lead to a lot of stalking.
If you see someone and that someone peek your interest you could find a lot of information about that person very quickly using strava. I know of a local guy who strava stalked a girl. He saw her pass by during a morning run. Then he contact her somehow, and now they live together.
A “happy” ending I guess (helps the 2 people are good looking and were sort of single at that point, so it worked out), but at the end, it was still staking.
I am glad its gone and yet I miss having it.
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I did that too. Though I don’t currently live with her (I did rent a room for a while), we did have a “relationship” and we are still friends.
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Depending on the course and Strava segments you can still use Strava as an interesting gauge without Flyby. I just look at all the major climbs and descents along the race course and use the “Today” leader boards. I saw that I lost my last race on the extended climbs by a few minutes here and there, but then gained some (not enough) time on the descents. It works best on the same day of the event obviously as the “Today” leaderboards dissapear after 24 hours… So I know I need to focus on longer climbs if I want to improve.
You can still use segments after the day of the event too, it just becomes a little harder as you’ll be focusing in on one competitor at a time typically. And, if segments don’t exist, just create them.
This works well for MTB but I don’t think it would be great for most CX courses.
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Besides less usability of flyby due to not enough people choosing to use it, the data is not all that good.
I have done many social rides with a friend. Usually we are side by side 95+% of the ride.
Sometimes the flyby will show one of us 50-100 yards in front nearly the whole ride.
Not very useful to evaluate details in a CX or XC race.
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