Try living near Peaty! Him and his pro mates have KOM’d almost everything.

See them sometimes riding trails, one in front of the other, having a chat and still going far faster than I ever could.

They don’t play by the same rules as us lot I’m afraid.

Liking this solution.

I wouldn’t necessarily blame Strava – it’s more likely to be the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the GPS device used to record the ride,

I’d blame Strava for the lack of quality control tbh. I mentioned up the page the KOM on the Bitch at Glentress, it’s a good example. If I look at my traces, you get 30-40 GPS plots from top to bottom, mostly pretty nicely in the shape of the trail. If you look at the KOM, you get 5 GPS plots and the first one is about 75% of the way down the trail. It’s just not a succesful logging of the segment.

There’s a level of reasonableness, Strava can’t tell if you cut the corners halfway down which is worth a good few seconds, but it can tell if the GPS plots are too infrequent, or too far from the real track, or in this case nowhere near the actual start of the segment…

So yes, it’s the GPS data that causes the problem but it’s Strava that accepts such useless info. They seem to have faced the decision of accepting rubbish and getting bad results, or being discerning and accurate which would probably lead to unhappy punters going why didn’t my time log, and a lower number of succesful segments which probably makes them look less omnipresent.

It does seem to be better than it was- when I started using it, it’d often log segments you’d never ridden just because you rode past the entrance, it now seems to look for some plots within the segment too.

None of this makes it useless, you just have to take everything with a huge pinch of salt.

The KOM and runner-up on one of my regular local segments was ridiculously quick – 3mins up on some seriously fast riders (not me, I hasten to add). Was prepared to accept this until I noticed that one had titled the ride ‘Argo to work’. 😀

I can put up with being 3 mins down on the leader, just not six minutes on an eight-minute segment!

I live/ride in the Tweed Valley, ever heard of the EWS?

One of the sections this year was Repeat Offender (top, middle, bottom), Greg Callaghan is sat at KOM on 3mins 57sesc (1 mile and nearly 1000ft of descending).

The fastest of the guys I ride with is at 5mins, and I’m past 7mins…, but still in the top half…

https://www.strava.com/segments/8228187

As said previously, the fast boys/girls aren’t riding the same trail as us really.

Lol about the ews, https://www.strava.com/activities/497460542
JG53 seems a bit quick…

Why not report it then?

Because it’s not a one off bad result- it’s one example on one segment that shows why Strava doesn’t really work. I could go through every segment I’ve ever ridden and manually report every dodgy time, but I’d not get very far before I went on a killing spree so instead I just go “Meh, strava’s pretty broken isn’t it” and use it within its limitations.

A few years ago i took Steve Jones (dirt), Stu Thomson (cut media), Joe Barnes and Liam Moynihan (Dudes of Hazzard) round Kirroughtree and elsewhere in the area for a Dirt mag photoshoot, whilst i thought i was pretty decent and fastish rider (could comfortably lap kirroughtree in under 2hrs on my SS) their riding showed me up for the wannabe mediocore mtb’r that i really was 😥 .

It wasn’t so much their fitness that made the difference but more so the speed they could carry through sections and out of turns/berms, on some areas of the trail where there was a climb or a pretty much straight through section i could comfortably keep up with them but as soon as became really tight n’ twisty with tricky rock or severe off camber rooty sections sections they just left me for dead despite me having “local knowledge” having lapped Kirroughtree literally hundreds n” hundreds of times (my local trail).

It was a genuine eye opener getting to ride with them for a couple of days and seeing how the genuinely fast folk can gain a second, or two, or three (or tens of seconds) 😥 on a relatively short section of trail.

I usually ride with a Garmin 800 and my times on Segments are pretty consistent (slow), but I’ll occasionally forget the Garmin and use the Strava app on my iphone. Whenever I do that I always seem to get PRs on random segments (especially ones with decent tree cover).

It’s all just a bit of fun though.

If it makes you feel any better I’ll come and ride it at least 20 seconds slower than you.

Our local Strava hero/ obsessive / saddo (delete as applicable) records on his Garmin and his phone, uploads both and takes the ‘best’ one for his KOMS, deletes the other

Phil Pearce (World Cup XC racer) owns our local trails!

If I’m more than 30-40% up on the KOM I’ll stop halfway down and learn a dead language or make a couple of hundred metres of coir rope out of decency.

I always take Strava leaderboards with a big pinch of salt. I follow a local xc endurance mtb rider who I use as my benchmark for times (read as target) if I can get anywhere close to his times I’d be very happy,

In reality I’m considerably slower but keep getting marginal improvements which is all I’m after and the main reason I use Strava.

my comments weren’t aimed at you, just in general, I’m just always amazed at both how seriously people take strava and how much faith people put in it’s accuracy, especially on short segments when the whole thing could be based on a few gps points.

I keep meaning to do a test of the height gain calculation from strava too, I think I can get my hands on some decent data to use so just need to work out the methodology.

Strava falls down when you’ve got adjacent fire roads or other trails, excessive shortcuts (not Strava lines, they’ve always occured) or excessive tree/leaf cover (which screws up the GPS). But it’s pretty accurate otherwise.

Regarding faster riders being a lot faster, I think a bit chunk of it comes down to MTBs not having engines. Once you lose speed it takes a lot of time or energy to regain. If you carry speed round a corner or over a jump or drop, you end up with a virtuous circle all the way down the trail. It adds up really fast. As soon as you take a feature slower than is possible it impacts not just that feature but dozens of yards more trail (depending on how steep/fast the trail is). And if you stall, like screwing up something technical or skidding/squaring off a turn, you lose even more time.

The Strava comparison tool really shows this clearly. This was the highpoint of my weekend’s riding yet I’m a similar amount per minute behind the KOM: https://www.strava.com/segments/6646217/compare/MTIxMjM1NDEwMTEsMzYzMDMxMjg2Mw==

The biggest loss in time was failing to carry speed around that right hand switchback. And despite being 40 seconds behind the KOM I was over 2 minutes quicker than the median rider (out of 4000+). I’ve seen what Pat CJ can ride like – he’s bloody quick, in a way that I can barely understand let alone attempt to do.

As an enthusiastic and reasonably quick 30something amateur I know I can ride a bike downhill fairly quickly compared to a newbie – but there are tons of amateur DHers, enduro racers and XC racers with amazing skills and fitness who aren’t much slower than the pros, and the pros are so much faster than someone of my mediocrity could achieve. I’ve very much enjoyed seeing how the winning riders demolish the stages on the races I’ve entered – they see the trail in a completely different way, carrying far more speed everywhere.