I’ve been on early shift this week, riding along the canal to work at 4am and it’s reawakened my old idea about riding the Stourport Ring and turning it in to a sort of long distance challenge, a bit like the South Downs Way or Mary Townley Loop.
It’s about 120km, so I reckon if I set off at 4am, I should be home again by midday easily enough.

The route runs through, or near, Worcester, Bromsgrove, Birmingham, the Black Country and Stourbridge, so I was thinking there might be a few people with easy access to take up the challenge.

So, if I was to create a Strava segment, starting & finishing at Kidderminster, is there any way other people could ride the same route, but start & finish at a different point, yet still claim the same segment?
Is that possible on Strava?

no, the start and end point are critical to how their maths engine works.

Oh, OK.
I don’t suppose I could get round it by dividing it in to several smaller segments, then combining them for a grand total?
So I could ride segments 1,2,3,4, then someone else could ride 3,4,1,2?

I’m just looking for an easy way to set the challenge without going to the trouble of creating a web site like http://www.southdownsdouble.net/index.html

Problem with that is if you start in the middle of a segment you will not set a time for it either at the start or end of the loop (as you will never do the segment from start to finish) so you wont get a total time. Far better just set an obvious start point if you want it to be an actual challenge.

well, the SDW, as an example, as a very defined start and end point.

I think if you’re going to set a loop as a challenge it should have a landmark or ‘popular’ spot start and end. The challenge is to do it from there in a particular direction and finish at that point.

Even setting lots of small segments penalises someone who joins half way through a segment?

That would certainly work – and it presumably wouldn’t be too far out of the way for anybody to start and finish at one of the endpoints – though I’m not sure how you’re planning on combining the times for the segments without a website. Not that it’s all that difficult to set one up, though incorporating Strava segment times into one isn’t that straightforward. You also have the issue that you could set a combined Strava segment record by riding the different sections on different days.

I can’t see why it would be that difficult to start and finish at an end point wherever you’re coming from – I’d imagine there are only a limited number of standard start/finish points anyway.

The idea is that as the route passes so many large populations, riders can start and finish at any point, not just at a designated start point.
Like aracer says, I envisioned people simply starting at their most convenient point, then riding past that to the end of the segment at the finish, to ensure they recorded all full segments.
It looks like it can’t be done easily on Strava anyway, so I guess the next best thing would be a dedicated web site and either gpx file uploads or links to individual Strava segments, all following the same route, but starting & finishing at different places.

I think as above it’s then qualifying it as having been done in ‘one go’?

Depends how you want to do it but easiest may be just to setup a strava club and ask people to flag rides they do that qualify for ‘the loop’. Allows comparison of times without having to manage it outside strava?

Thanks wwaswas, I only use Strava for the basics, mainly just logging my total mileage, so I wasn’t aware there were clubs within it.
I suppose my next step is to stop talking about this and actually do it. Then I can set up a Strava club and see if anyone else wants to have a go.