Strava activities are the only way I know some of my friends are still alive

The Box Hill Stava KoM was broken recently, twice. First by Rory Townsend from the Q36.5 team, followed shortly afterwards by Dom Jackson from Foran CCC.

Michael Hutchinson

Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. As a rider he won multiple national titles in both Britain and Ireland and competed at the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games. He was a three-time Brompton folding-bike World Champion, and once hit 73 mph riding down a hill in Wales. His Dr Hutch columns appears in every issue of Cycling Weekly magazine

There was a lot of reporting of this. According to several websites, Box Hill is “an iconic climb”, and “perhaps the most coveted Strava segment in the UK.” It seems appropriate that while France has Alpe d’Huez, and Spain has Sa Calobra, the UK’s icon of athleticism is a short, gentle climb, rounding two whole hairpins to a National Trust cafe.

On the other hand, my relationship with Strava has never really recovered from inventing the concept before the Strava guys, but then totally failing to actually create a product. It was the closest I’ve ever come to fully inhabiting the character of George Costanza from Seinfeld.

When Strava did appear, I got over my bitterness and used it for a few years. But then I drifted away. For a start, I don’t flatter myself that anyone is interested in my rides. For another thing, if they are, I don’t want them to discover that I’m so lacking in adventurous spirit that I have three basic rides and run them on a rotation.

I don’t pay all that much attention to anyone else’s activities either. I’m not giving my mate Bernard kudos for driving to the supermarket with his still-running Garmin in his pocket no matter how enthusiastically the app prompts me to. The only activity that I really notice is a friend I haven’t seen for years who uploads an identical walk round his local woods every morning before breakfast. It’ll stop happening one day and it’ll be the only way I know he’s dead.

As for KoMs, my only real motivation there was another friend who decided he wanted to get 100 of them. I belted around a few of the local roads on my TT bike for a week or two, and amassed quite a few KoM-beating efforts that I didn’t make public on the app. Then every time he got to 99 KoMs, I made one of mine public to knock him back to 98. Sometimes I was lucky enough to deprive him of the very segment he’d just uploaded. I won’t need Strava to know when he dies, because he will haunt me.

Those were the merry days when KoMs were reasonably easy to get. These days I’ve concluded that there are only four sorts of KoM. Those held by cheats, those held by idiots like Bernard who forget to turn their computers off, those 500 mph ones caused by glitches in the GPS, and those held by me. There are very few of the last variety.

Around here the countryside is so flat that most KoMs just tell you which way the wind was blowing. The only one I ever really went hunting for was a four-mile one held en masse by the local chaingang. I nabbed it alone, armed with nothing more than a World Tour TT bike, a prototype skinsuit that wasn’t supposed to be used in public, an aero helmet, an autumnal gale and 430 of my best watts.

And it got nabbed in turn by a local rider who does segments behind a mate on a scooter, on the basis that it’s just the same as doing them in a chaingang. The wise thing to do is not care too much one way or another. It’s not that much sillier than my prototype suit.

I still find that I check the app after most rides, just to see if somewhere along the line I did something amazing. I never do. If I did I’d probably leave it as a private triumph anyway. Unless it’s Box Hill. If I get that one, you’ll know about it.

This column originally appeared in Cycling Weekly print magazine. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.