What is myWindsock?
myWindsock exists to settle an argument you have with yourself on every windy ride: was it actually that bad, or were your legs just off? Give it a course — a Strava activity, a Strava route or segment, a GPX or TCX file, a ride from Garmin, Wahoo, Komoot or RideWithGPS — and it walks the weather along it, point by point, matching wind direction and speed against the direction you were pointing at that moment. The map comes back as its Wind Lines, coloured by what the air was doing to you rather than by gradient.
The metrics are where it gets specific. Feels Like Elevation™ redraws your elevation profile with the headwind converted into hill, so a flat drag into a gale looks like the climb it felt like. wImpact™ works out how much slower — or faster — a completely calm day would have been. Wind Adjusted Time™ goes one step further and gives you the time the activity would have taken with the wind at zero, which is the plainest possible statement of what the weather cost you. There's also Air Speed (the speed the air actually moved past you, adjusted for wind shear), Air Penalty (the gap between the distance you rode along the ground and the distance of air you pushed through) and, if you ride with power, a CdA figure for how efficiently you were cutting through it.
The same physics engine runs forwards. Load a route you haven't ridden yet, set a date and time, and it produces a rolling forecast that moves with your predicted position — the weather at kilometre 60 is the weather forecast for when you'll get there, not for when you set off. It reads from Strava rather than only into it: connect once and your activities, routes, KOMs and starred segments are all available, and if you want the analysis to travel back, an opt-in setting writes a myWindsock report into your Strava activity description. It's a UK web app, run by Arclid.com Ltd, and it grew out of a hand-drawn wind map for a local club 10-mile time trial course in autumn 2016.
Key Features
Feels Like Elevation™, wImpact™ and Wind Adjusted Time™
Three different answers to "how much did the wind cost me": one as an artificial elevation profile, one as a percentage of your energy the weather absorbed, one as the time you'd have posted in still air. They're the reason people paste ride links in here rather than checking a normal forecast.
Rolling forecasts that move with you
The forecast follows your anticipated progress along the course instead of freezing at your start time. Premium adds the Spatial3 weather engine, which sources conditions by elevation as well as distance and time.
Scan Forecast
Compare the same course across many days and times to find the window worth riding it in. There's an AI assistant if you'd rather just ask — "what's the best day this week at 1pm to do this ride?" — or "compare the forecasts at 5 minute intervals between 3pm and 4pm today" if you're pacing something short.
Segment Windsocks
Pick a Strava segment — one of your KOMs, a starred one, any segment you've loaded — and it watches the forecast for it and emails you up to 24 hours ahead when conditions turn favourable. One free, five on Lite, fifteen above that.
Strava leaderboard weather
See what the wind was doing for the top ten efforts on a segment, plotted as a wind rose showing which direction the fastest times tend to come from. This one needs a Strava subscription on top of premium, because it's Strava's leaderboard data.
Aero field testing
With power data it calculates CdA on every ride, and the field testing suite lets you do position and equipment comparisons on a training loop: repeat laps in one position, stop, change something, repeat. Power and Unlimited plans.
UK time trial and event forecasts
The events section carries CTT open and club time trials listed by course code, each with a predicted time and full analysis, plus Parkrun courses and a route for organisers to add their own events. It's live and current — the listings run day by day through the coming week.
myWindsock Report on Strava
Opt in and myWindsock appends its numbers to your Strava activity descriptions — you choose which fields: CdA, Feels Like Elevation, Weather Impact %, headwind percentage and average wind speed, longest headwind, air speed, temperature, precipitation. You can also push a report onto a past activity one at a time.
Who It's For
- Time triallists who want a pacing plan and a course recce before the event rather than a weather app afterwards
- Riders who suspect the wind is lying to them and want the headwind quantified in seconds and metres of climbing
- Power meter owners, who get the whole aero half of the product — CdA tracking and field testing — that heart-rate-only riders don't
- UK club racers whose course is already in the events list under its CTT code
