Well all good things… For the avid Strava fans out there, you will probably have seen an email land in your inbox over the last 24 hours or so. There are changes afoot with what features those on the free subscription can use. You will no longer be able to use the compare segments section without a subscription.

Here is a copy of the email sent for full details

Hi Greg, to serve our athletes better and to ensure we’re around for the long run, a few of our free features that are especially complex and expensive to maintain, like segment efforts, are now part of a Strava subscription. The impact of these changes on the API include:

1. Segment Leaderboards are no longer available via the API
2. Segment Efforts will only be available for Strava subscribers

We realize these changes could be especially challenging for some of you, so they’ll be non-breaking for 30 days, returning empty data during that time so you can make necessary adjustments. After June 18th, those endpoints will either omit the data or return an error message. You can find more details here.

Strava API Support Team

For the uninitiated, segments are stretches of distance, that you automatically clock a time on, and for the lucky few be called KOM or QOM (King/Queen of the Mountain) if you hold the fastest time over that section. They are a great way of turning, what could per chance be a boring run, into a section to look forward to. Also its great for adding a bit of spirited competition between friends. I know I have gotten a good kick out of pipping a friend by a few seconds on a particular section of a trail, we frequent a lot.

The official Strava definition is as follows;

Segments are one of Strava’s coolest features. They are portions of road or trail created by members where athletes can compare times.

So what are our options. Stay as you are and lose the segment comparison ability or pay the subscription. The latter although isn’t favorable, especially in these tough times but is not as bad as initially thought.

Well, I know what I’ll be doing ?

* Figures accurate as of 19/05/2020