Right, so this one’s been a long time coming. Every few weeks someone in the club WhatsApp asks how to set up a Strava segment, usually after they’ve smashed a climb and want to know where they sit on the leaderboard. And fair enough – segments are one of the best bits of Strava. They turn an ordinary stretch of Rutland lane into a little battleground where you can chase a time or hunt a KOM and have a proper natter about it over coffee afterwards.
So I thought I’d write the whole thing down once and for all. And there’s no better excuse than this: I’m creating a segment for our LightSpeed Rollout this Sunday, and I want as many of you as possible to log an effort on it so we can start to build a fastest rider leaderboard.
Here’s exactly how to do it.
First, the honest bit: you’ll need a Strava Premium subscription
I’m not going to dress this up. Creating segments used to be free, but since Strava reshuffled its subscription model a couple of years back, making a segment is now a paid Premium feature. If you’re on the free tier you can still ride segments, see your time appear on a leaderboard, and compete with the rest of us – you just can’t be the one who creates them.
That’s actually fine for most of you, because you only need one person in the club to build a segment and then everyone else benefits for free. So if you’ve got a subscription, brilliant, you can be a segment-maker. If you haven’t, don’t worry – just ride Sunday’s route, upload it and you’ll pop straight onto the leaderboard I’m setting up.
And if you’ve been meaning to subscribe anyway, we’ve actually got a Strava discount code for being a verified club and partner over on the blog, that’ll take the sting out of it – worth a look before you sign up at full price.
One more thing worth knowing before we start, you can’t create a segment on the Strava phone app. It has to be done on the website, on a laptop or desktop, from one of your own recorded rides. I learned this the annoying way, sat in the car park in Peterborough trying to do it on my phone. Don’t be me.
What you need before you start
- A Strava Premium subscription (as above)
- An activity you’ve already ridden and uploaded that covers the stretch of road you want to turn into a segment. Strava builds the segment from your actual GPS data, so the road has to exist in one of your rides first.
- A computer – laptop, desktop, whatever. Just not the phone app.
That last point matters for Sunday. If you want to be the one who creates a particular segment from our LightSpeed Rollout, you’ll need to have ridden it and uploaded it before you can carve it up. I’ll be doing the main one, but if you fancy making your own little sprint segment along the way, the door’s open.
How to create a Strava segment, step by step
Here’s the whole process. It honestly takes about three minutes once you’ve done it once.
1. Log in to Strava on the website. Head to strava.com on your computer and sign in. Not the app – the website.
2. Open the activity you want to use. Go to your activities and click into the ride that contains the road you’re after. For me, that’ll be our LightSpeed Rollout which we’ve taken on a couple of times so far this year.
3. Find the ‘Create Segment’ option. On the activity page, click the three dots (the ‘more’ menu), and you’ll see Create Segment (highlighted below). Click that.
4. Set your start and end points. You’ll now see your ride drawn on a map with a green slider (start) and a red slider (end). Drag these along your route to mark exactly where you want the segment to begin and finish. This is the fiddly, fun part.
5. Zoom right in. Genuinely the most important tip I can give you. The closer you zoom, the more precisely you can place those start and end points. Switch the map off “Terrain” view and onto Standard or Satellite so you can get in nice and tight. When you’re zoomed in, the slider nudges in small increments; zoomed out, it jumps about all over the place.
6. Keep your start and end away from junctions. Don’t start or finish a segment right on top of a junction or stop line. If there’s a chance riders are braking, stopping, or giving way there, all that faffing time gets counted into the segment — which makes for a messy, unfair leaderboard. Pick a clean, flowing bit of road. Around here, the long open drags out towards the Hambleton peninsula are perfect for this.
7. Avoid making it too short. Really short, sprint-length segments (the kind that take well under half a minute) get matched badly because of GPS sampling. A segment somewhere from a few hundred metres up to a proper climb or drag works far better. For reference, Strava needs segments to be at least 200 metres long anyway, so anything punchier than that won’t fly.
8. Click Next, and let Strava check for duplicates. Strava will have a look to see if a similar segment already exists on that road. If it does, it’ll show you so you can compare. If yours is genuinely different, you can carry on and create a new public one.
9. Name it and save. Give it a clear, friendly name – something the club will recognise. I’d suggest a consistent prefix so ours are easy to find. Then save, and that’s it. Your segment is live.
Naming our Stamford Cycling segments
To keep things tidy and findable, I’m going to name the ones I create with a club friendly tag, something like:
Stamford Cycling x [name of the stretch]
That way, when you search Strava or scroll your activity, you’ll instantly spot which segments are ours. If you create your own off Sunday’s ride, do us a favour and use the same “Stamford Cycling x” prefix so we can pull them all together later.
After Sunday: how to get on the leaderboard
This is the easy bit and it’s free for everyone. Once I’ve published the segment and you’ve ridden the route:
- Upload your ride to Strava as normal.
- Strava automatically matches your effort to any segments along the way.
- Open the ride, scroll to the segments section, and there’s your time – sitting on the club leaderboard.
No extra effort, no subscription needed to appear on it. Just ride it, upload it, done. Then we can all squabble gently over who took the KOM at Fika afterwards.
A quick word on riding segments sensibly
Segments are a laugh, but I’ll always say this: don’t go chasing a KOM through a blind bend or a busy junction. These are public roads, shared with cars, walkers, horses and the rest. The leaderboard’s still there next week. Ride for the time on the open, safe stretches, and ride your head on the rest. That’s the Stamford way, and it’s why we all still have our skin intact.
So – that’s segments. If you’re subscribed, have a go at making one off your next ride to get comfortable with it before Sunday. And if you’re not, just turn up, ride well, and watch your name slot onto the board.
See you on the LightSpeed Rollout. I’ll have the segment ready and waiting.
