A question for my fellow Strava users: Is "Kudos" tied to performance? For readers unfamiliar with "Kudos", it is Strava's "Like" button equivalent. My perception has been that your die-hard friends give you kudos even if you just slogged through a few slow miles and felt terrible. Then you have other followers who only give out kudos for exceptional performances, like a long run, a great race, or just a faster than average run.
To see how much my perceptions lined up with reality, I downloaded my Strava activities from the Strava API for the entire year to see if there was a correlation to performance and kudos. I limited the results to just runs (no bike or hikes).
Kudos Based on Miles
For the first analyisis, I sought to determine what effect mileage had on kudos. The total number of runs included was 541 with an average distance 3.3 miles and about 10 kudos per run. I ran a simple linear regression analysis for miles run and generated the scatter plot shown below.
The results clearly indicate more miles means more kudos. The linear formula reported that I earned on average 1.26 kudos for each additional mile. So people seem to give credit for longer runs.
Kudos Based on Pace
The next analyis was to see if "pace" had any effect. To take mileage out of equation, I used just my 3-4 mile normal runs for the year with a pace between 7 and 9 minute miles. This way each run would be roughly the same except for the pace. This included 153 runs.
The results showed pace had no effect on kudos. So whether I ran a hard 7:30 pace or a slow 8:45, it did not matter.
I suspect other factors come into play such as time of day, map or no map, or weekends vs. weekday. A catchy
title or a scenic photo might increase your kudos count without having to endure the extra miles. Or maybe it's
mostly based on the mood of the follower. Further analysis is needed to confirm this, but until then, keep posting
your fun and hard workouts.
Kudos to you!