I always thought you needed to be a premium member to access the GPX files on strava (probably the major draw for me if I was to go premium).

However, I happened to click on a link(http://app.strava.com/routes/81560) in one of the forums and a route page popped up when I was able to download a file. Does anybody know how to access the repository for such routes?

It was a premium feature once but they opened it up to the masses at some point!

I don’t know that there’s any accessible route database as such – AFAIK you can only view routes that people share with you. (of course, you can just change the number in the URL which will give you a route at random!)

You can also create a route from anyone’s activity that you can see, if that helps at all.

You can download routes as a non-premium member so long as they’re not set to private (but then you wouldn’t be able to see them)

The best way to find routes is in explore mode – find a trail/road you want to ride, look at the segments there, look at the leaderboard for that segment and then you can drill down to the ride on which people set those times. You can then download that as you’ve found.

I’m probably being a dummy, but when I either go to explore routes, or via the segment route as suggested I can see people rides but the GPX button on the map is greyed out and when you click on it the message “Upgrade to Premium and download new routes you like to your Garmin.” appears.

Am I doing something wrong?

What GPX button? You need to click on the spanner icon and create a route, save it, then go to your routes and click on the “export” button.

cheers, got it 🙂

Not sure if it is totally relevant to the question or not but you can ‘Explore>Activity’ too.

So if you click explore, then activity you can search (say) for a ride that started in Manchester with ‘Peak District’ in the title that is 60 miles with 4000ft climbing or whatever.