My Strava subscription rolled over this month. I hadn’t meant it to, but had forgotten to cancel it. It’s cancelled now, but I could have paid £54.99 for another year. I rarely use the app now.
Back in 2012, when I initially joined Strava, it was different. There were few users, at least in the UK, and finding I had a cluster of KOMs on local climbs was fun, if slightly unexpected. Leaderboards were open to all users.
Looking back now, there are 34 pages of efforts on my top climb and I’m ranked 80th of more than 800 riders. My KOM didn’t last long, even back in 2012, with someone logging a time twice as fast as mine in the days before you could flag a suspicious activity.
Back then, there were fairly discrete, well-separated segments to tackle; now almost every road on the Strava map has an orange trace superimposed. It feels pointless to build your own segment, practically anywhere you ride. If you do plan to try to take a Strava KOM, you have to sort through a mass of competing segments to choose one.
Unless you’re an elite competitor, the race for a KOM is largely irrelevant, even with Strava having added segmentation by age-group and weight class for paying subscribers.
Of course, you can look to improve your own best time, but even that starts to feel a little pointless when you’ve ridden a segment almost 300 times, as I have for the closest segment to my front door. In truth, I rarely look at Strava segments anymore.
Strava clearly recognised that KOM-bagging was becoming redundant for many of its users, adding the Local Legend badge for the rider who has ridden a segment the most times in 90 days, but it doesn’t have the same allure as being the fastest.
A different angle
The change in KOM hunting reflects a broader shift from Strava in recent years: it has sought to reposition itself as the social network for athletes. It has added the option to drop photos, and subsequently video content, onto your rides and increased its own editorial content.
It has competition in this space, though, with Komoot in particular overlapping and arguably offering richer functionality. And, of course, you can always arrange rides, and share routes and pictures on messaging apps such as WhatsApp.
But the biggest threat must be Garmin. Its Connect phone and web app provides a huge amount of functionality that matches Strava’s.
As with Strava, you can plot routes on Connect and upload them to your device. It has heatmaps to help avoid sending you down major roads and it gives you a heap of post-ride stats.
It even has its own segments, and you can add media and share your rides with your friends. You can add pace and power guides to your rides and get prompts to eat and drink on your Garmin cycling computer.
And Garmin has a lot more data on me than Strava to use to analyse my performance and fitness – functionality provided by Strava to its paying subscribers.
Wearing a smartwatch 24/7, Garmin knows my off-bike heart rate and heart rate variability, how much I’m moving around during the day and how well I’ve slept. It can even tell me how much to drink post-ride.
Free for now
Garmin provides all this for free – for now. It has already launched Connect+ as a subscription service for some analysis functionality, but this puts new value-added features behind a paywall rather than taking functionality away from existing users.
If Garmin follows the same route as Strava and places more of its functionality behind a paywall, how much would I be prepared to pay to access my own data?
For now, it seems like the best alternative to Strava, particularly since it’s the only brand to offer a fully integrated package of cycling computer, smartwatch and analysis app on the web and my phone.
On a more positive note, Strava did reimburse me my subscription fee when I made contact and it still offers a handy repository of all my activities, regardless of where I recorded them.
