Short version of the idea: add a way to easily sum up an athlete's times across multiple Strava segments on the same day. Fondos and Enduros are bicycle event formats where organizers set a course, and then identify several sections as "race segments". Participants ride the course at their own pace, and at the race segments, they try to set the fastest time they can. At the end, the times across all the segments are summed up and the winner is the person with the overall lowest time. Strava segments offer an opportunity to run grassroots events in this format without requiring expensive timing equipment or a lot of volunteers. These events provide a competitive outlet without all the stress, pressure, and expense of a formal road race or XC mountain bike race, and competitive events build community, inspire people to train harder, and bring people into the sport. Here are two examples of events trying to use Strava segments to create fun events for their cycling community: 1. https://www.ristatecyclingchampionships.com/about 2. https://www.brazendropouts.org/mount-horeb-climbduro Offering an easy way to sum up a person's efforts across multiple segments on a given day will make it easier for others to put on events like this. This is good for cycling communities, since these are accessible to all skill levels and bring people together, and it seems good for Strava since people will need Strava accounts to get their results. In terms of implementation, I have two ideas: 1. Expand* the Segments API endpoint to return all athlete efforts on a given day. This would let a third party developers (like me :)) create an app that event organizers could use. 2. You could build this into Strava as an event type. For example, imagine creating a club event in Strava of the "enduro" type, and then selecting a Strava Route and identifying the race segments. Then people could join the event, do the ride, and go back to the page to see a leaderboard of the combined times of everyone who has ridden the route thus far. Personally, I think option 1 would be the least work for the most gain, but option 2 would be very cool if you have the time. *Technically, you can currently build an app that can do this with the existing API, but that requires every athlete participating in the event to sign into your Strava app in order for the app to get their segment efforts. Getting people to link their accounts is a hurdle, and events would be more successful if people could just upload their ride to their profile like they normally do.
... View more