We reckon it’s high time there was a specific ‘mountain bike’ category on Strava. Consider this the beginning of a campaign. Or just a big moan.

>>> Your most stupid Strava segment names

Campaign or moan, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just get Strava to acknowledge us mountain bikers.

As a mountain biker Strava is both great and annoying. One of its principal annoying factors is that it’s impossible to specify that you’re mountain biking. It’s currently impossible to filter out road cycling from your stats and your segment searching.

Frustrating Strava limitations for mountain bikers

Mountain biking is also poorly reflected in the ‘estimated average power’ and ‘energy output’ stats. If you’ve ever done a whole day of sessioning descents you’ll know how exhausting and hunger-making they are. Strava’s power/calorie estimators treat like you’ve been smoothly freewheeling down a road all day.

Also, when it comes to route building it would be fantastic to be able to filter it down to just mountain bike routes/segments as opposed to the current all-in method that renders that particular function of Strava almost entirely useless for mountain bikers.

And how amazing would Strava Global Heatmap be if you could switch to show only mountain bike rides? Very amazing, that’s how amazing.

The solution is already in there

If Strava can be set to differentiate between on-foot activities (run, walk, hike etc) then it surely can’t be a huge issue to do the same for two-wheeled activities?

Similarly even within activities it’s possible to filter by gender, age etc. The filtering knowhow – and even its structure and layout – is seemingly pretty much already there.

Or how about something like the ‘commute’ tag label you can put on rides at the moment? There are plenty of acceptable ways to implement a specific mountain bike mode into Strava.

JUST DO IT ALREADY.

This request is actually almost as old as Strava itself. A search of their help forums reveals requests going back to at least 2012. Each time the response from Strava is either a banal ‘we’re looking into all feedback’ shrug-off or else silence.

Strava Year in Sport

This particular campaign/moan/rant of ours was inspired by the release of Strava’s annual Year in Sport stats round-up. Which is all well and good and genuinely interesting but it’s missing one thing: mountain biking stats.

Unlike our road cycling brethren, we don’t know which town has the fastest mountain bikers, or does the longest average mountain bike rides, or the hilliest mountain bike rides, or who rides their mountain bike the most, or which are the most popular mountain bike segments.

As it stands the only applicable stats us poor dirty riders can glean from the Year in Sport are as follows…

• 31 million rides in UK ridden in 2017
• 904 million kilometres cycled in the UK in 2017
• 8.1 billion metres climbed on a bike in the UK in 2017
• 344,323,824 kudos given in UK
• If you give someone kudos there’s a 20% chance the receiver will give kudos back to you within 24 hours
• Setting yourself a target can also have a big effect, with more than 9 out of 10 people who set a goal in January still active 10 months later.

Don’t get us wrong. Most of us here love Strava. Which is why we so desperately want to see it better reflect its mountain biking users.