News: Competitive Cyclist and Strava Will Pay You to Ride Your Bike

Brand marketers are in a bit of a pickle these days. They can count Twitter followers and Facebook likes, but sifting through the casual fans to find the die hards is a tricky business. Competitive Cyclist has realized that the advent of Strava means they have an easy way to determine exactly who the truly …

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Brand marketers are in a bit of a pickle these days. They can count Twitter followers and Facebook likes, but sifting through the casual fans to find the die hards is a tricky business. Competitive Cyclist has realized that the advent of Strava means they have an easy way to determine exactly who the truly hardcore riders are: saddle time. They’re taking that realization and doing something pretty cool with it.

If you link your Strava account with Competitive Cyclist by clicking here (http://www.competitivecyclist.com/strava), you will get $1 of in-store Competitive Cyclist credit for every hour you ride.

This is an especially good deal for me, because I’m slow. If it was a dollar of credit per hundred miles I might be able to earn two this year. But no, it’s hours.

In the interest of never asking our readers to do something that we, the Singletracks.com team, wouldn’t do ourselves, I went ahead and signed up. When I did I found a short list of stipulations:

  1. Each hour ridden is worth $1.00 in store credit, in half-hour increments. So, a 1:45 minute ride would receive $1.50.
  2. Credits will be deposited into your Competitive Cyclist account within 24 hours.
  3. Credits will expire at 11:59pm MT on the last day of the following month. For example, credits earned for a ride in March will expire on April 30th.
  4. You can receive up to 40 credits per month.
  5. Credits are non-transferable.
  6. Multiple credits can be combined when placing an order.
  7. Time is measured in moving time.
  8. Manual entries do not count.
  9. Only the Strava activity of “cycling” will count.
  10. Activity completed prior to syncing accounts does not count.

As fine print goes, that’s pretty fair. I don’t know when I’m going to find time to ride 40 hours in a month, but I have no doubt that someone will do it every month. Some times I look at people’s Strava profiles and I’m like, dang, is this your job? Because it’s kind of my job and I don’t ride 10 hours a day.

Anyway, check it out, sign up, and earn some credits. As far as methods of incentivizing die hard people goes, this is one of the coolest I’ve seen.