Why does strava always massively reduce my average speed

Compared to my garmin. I always pause my garmin at traffic lights and recently found that my average speeds are well below what it’s showing on my garmin..almost a full mph today. Whilst I know strava has some weird algorithms in there this has only recently become an issue. It use to be maybe .1 or.2 mph lower, but last few 5 rides it’s been well out.

Has anything changed, or is there a setting I need to change. Not a massive issue, but annoying all the same.

It used to be that Strava didn’t account for time stopped at lights, cafes, etc. so you needed to enable auto-pause on the Garmin. Strava now does allow for stopped time so you can turn auto-pause off. Whether both together make a difference I don’t know.

IMO if you are stopped, that’s part of the average 😉 . I know it’s a frustration with road rides in that you want to assume the ride was all non-stop but have to stop due to lights.

However, I find Strava is usually a bigger average figure than Garmin if I just leave the thing un-paused. Strava accounts for stops in the data and they prefer you don’t auto-pause. Also I was finding auto-pause was screwing things up making a slow steep climb (this is off-road) seem to take a couple of seconds and I kept getting KOMs and rides would get flagged. That was pre-Garmin on an old phone though years ago.

Not that I really care. I go with how many miles did I cover in the time I was out, and even then I’m not bothered if I’ve crawled along so long as it was fun. I also don’t do leaderboards etc any more.

Not that I really care

I’d say the same but obviously I care enough to ask the question!

IMO if you are stopped, that’s part of the average

Well yeah..but as I ride similar routes regularly  it’s nice to compare for the sake of seeing progress . At the weekend I didn’t get stopped at the lights once on way out of town, but on some days it’s stop start for first 3 miles. Not really an issue given i can see the numbers on the garmin, but it wojld be nice to have them reflected on strava. As I say it Seems to be a recent issue hence the question.

Just accept that you can’t have a straight run all the time.

Call it a high intensity training interval getting back up to speed to keep your average high. 😉

The race is long, and in the end, you’re only racing yourself 😉