Strava has announced Local Legends – billed as a new way for Strava athletes to compete on segments.
For background, Strava notes that… ‘Local Legends focuses on celebrating grit, discipline, and passion, not an athlete’s speed. Becoming a Local Legend takes dedication, focus and a smart strategy.’
This new feature is based on the number of efforts on a segment instead of speed, where running and cycling the same route regularly earns subscribers the top position on the leaderboard.
Local Legends is available to all Strava athletes, but only subscribers will see the full histogram leaderboard.
Local Legends rewards the athlete with the highest number of efforts on a segment with a ‘Laurel crown’ and they become the Local Legend of that particular segment. They remain a Local Legend until someone else has more segment efforts.
The new feature is now available for CA, CO, FL, IL, NJ, NY, TX subscribers in the US. It goes nationwide across the US and in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Japan and Brazil on July 15.
- There are over 17 million segments on Strava
- Local Legends uses a rolling window competition model of 90 days.
- In this mode, the achievement is given to the athlete who has the most segment efforts on a segment over the last 90 days. Efforts older than 90 days will be removed from the overall effort count.
- A rolling window model aims to give more people an opportunity to stay competitive with the field.
- Athletes ‘just have to show up to move up.’ The number of efforts wins over speed.
- The Laurel crown is always up for grabs.
- Local Legends has a different look than the typical Strava leaderboard.
- Rather than a list, Strava shows athletes where their number of efforts falls relative to the Local Legend on a histogram.
- Athletes see how many efforts they have, so they know how many more are needed to win.
Local Legends will activate like other Strava achievements. The Strava user and other athletes can see Local Legends achievements on their activities in the feed, the activity details page and segment results section.
