I joined Strava in 2016 – for those who don’t know what it is, it’s a free internet based service for tracking physical activity. As well as saving me having to keep a training diary, one of the key benefits for me at least was the Segments feature which calculates the fastest person between two given navigable points on a map, either on foot or bike. Ever the competitor, it wasn’t long before I made it my mission to bag one of these things and go top of the leaderboard until someone came along and usurped me! I was on holiday down in Somerset and targeted a stretch of road between the villages of Stogumber and Vellow and treated it way too seriously, which I’m sure was in contravention of Strava etiquette, but anyway, I got the prize I wanted and with it a little crown icon on your run and thus, an addiction was forged!
There was no target for obtaining more crowns but as my running developed, I found myself being able to compete for much more of them. They gave every run a purpose or target which undoubtedly helped me improve as well as enabling me to have fun planning routes and exploring places I would not normally visit. When I reached 500, I thought that would be enough but I had too many old scores to settle. When I had a crown taken from me, I resolved to win it back in most cases. The losses fired me up to achieve more. I had plenty of other goals too, iconic hills or climbs, beating your mates and so on. Obviously, the true test comes in running a race but these short sharp bursts turned virtually every training run into a fartlek session. Whether this helped me more than hindered we will never know but it motivated me to get out and run more which WAS a big help.
As time wore on, it became harder and harder to gain more crowns. My running had arguably plateaued somewhat and with more and more people using the platform, the standards invariably increased. Locally, there was some quite intense competition at times which raised the bars yet higher. Away from home, it would be almost impossible to reclaim titles lost to local athletes and there became some bizarre kind of pressure to perform in order to keep moving forwards and not backwards.
There was plenty of fun times though. Most races involved me bagging a crown on my “warm-up”. I realised that if I could take a segment each time I ran, the total would soon rack up. My club social runs almost always involved some moderately convoluted routes in order to pick off some of the few remaining local crowns I hadn’t already got. One particular highlight was a late September sojourn around Bedworth one Sunday morning. I was in good shape having pulled out one of my best ever runs in the John Fraser 10 at the start of the month, still a PB five years later, and winning the Brewood Woggle 10K a week earlier. I set myself a target of getting 20 crowns in a single “run” which involved some meticulous planning in order to minimize travel between segments and thus conserve energy. I had a couple of sheets of A4 paper with me identifying the start and finish points of each segment, along with a target pace and a gradient guide. I lined up 25 or so and planned to just keep ticking them off until I got too tired to carry on.
The run was not continuous as I had to stop repeatedly for both breath and navigation. My knowledge of Bedworthian roads was rather limited and I felt that if I missed a few targets, I’d still have enough back up to get to 20 which represented a page full on the app. All went well, I got 25 in total, a clean sweep, spoiled only by the fact that I could have had a 26th had I known it was there! A week later some bloke from Dorset turned up and took ten of them off me. Now, at the end of 2023, only five of those original times of mine remain. Admittedly, some of the targets were pretty soft, low hanging fruit as they say, but it’s not an achievement I’d be able to get anywhere near now as the standards have risen across the board and I think for anyone to accomplish it now would be a real feat, regardless of ability.
If you asked me what was my most treasured segment, I would probably say the one from Twycross down to Orton on the Hill when I tied myself in knots to get there. I thought it would be borderline but it turned out I’d beaten it with a big margin. Running up Merevale Lane from bottom to top in under 8 minutes was pretty iconic (for a local) but it was wind assisted. I’d often plan routes involving segments where the wind would give you an advantage. I used to love a good storm. Check the BBC weather website and grab some glory in line with the wind direction! I really wanted to get the one that takes you from the golf course up to Purley Chase Lane. I got within seconds a couple of times but never beyond Daniel Gaffney’s amazing mark (he’s a 2:22 marathoner) however, while waiting for a few years for dry weather, helpful winds and some Alphafly trainers, Ryan Preece got in there first and put it out of my reach.
There came a point when I thought I should set a target for myself to reach and leave things there, otherwise there would be this never-ending merry go round of chasing more and more abstract titles, further and further away from home and spending a disproportionate amount of time working out how best to achieve the things. Most people at my club had stopped “playing” by now, either because they knew they couldn’t win or more likely they quite simply had better training to occupy themselves with, which did me a favour in the end. Preecey was both hero and villain. He soon developed his running to become quicker than me but for every crown he took, he’d give one back by creating all manner of obscure routes and tracks for me to find and vanquish.
The journey was mainly highs – that little thrill each time you’d download your watch and see the target hit, the bonus of getting a segment you had no idea even existed. Driving the car out to new places outside of my immediate running zone seemed somewhat excessive in order to grab a couple of crowns. I’d always endeavour to make each trip as bountiful as possible and it certainly enabled me to discover some real hidden treasures of beautiful new places to run and explore. There were plenty of rotten locations too I hasten to add! Rutted farm tracks between two points of zero interest were noted as places not worth revisiting, even if the segment was lost. To save energy, I had a habit of doing just enough to beat the existing target. Occasionally, I would need to go eyeballs-out but not often.
Some of the lows were when I bumped into a Hermitage Harrier, Paul Gregory, doing the exact same thing as me but from Coalville way. Some territory between the two of us would frequently change hands, and, in order to stop him from going after my segments, I tried targeting multiples of his on the same run just to make him keep away. It was about the third attempt when I had success, a six or seven crown haul around Newton Burgoland when each time I went hard to send a message which thankfully got through. There remains a mutual respect these days. Paul has a greater number than me and has achieved faster times over his career, but I have been a quicker runner than him in recent years so I wasn’t having him beating me. I did have to chuckle when he turned up in Tywyn, Wales two days after I’d departed and had a nibble at a few records I’d just set! Complete coincidence.
I’ve set records in Greece, Spain, Wales, France and Austria (when on holiday of course!). The worst part, aside from being injured then seeing your gold go without the ability to respond, was probably when you hammered out a segment then discovered subsequently that your GPS watch did not pick the run up correctly and your effort was wasted. This didn’t happen too often, the most recent time was immediately ahead of the Lichfield 10K back in September. I didn’t tell my Tamworth team mates I’d been segment chasing pre-race as it didn’t look very professional at the time when we were chasing the league!
Dropping a segment chase into a long run while marathon training did not strike me as something I ought to be doing, compelled as I felt to do it. I figured that 1000 would be a sensible milestone to get to before stopping. A concerted push to edge me ever closer through the autumn left me needing three more on a cold November night. With five targets lined up in Austrey, a place quite nearby but somewhere I’d not run frequently, I set about my task and picked up three from the first three. Given it was dark and drizzly and the fact that I had now reached my target, I really didn’t see the point in chasing the other two. One belonged to Dave Hill and I didn’t see the need to nick one off him, especially as by and large he’d left my crowns alone despite having an abundance of ability capable of helping himself to everything.
Austrey is a nice village but gloomily lit of an evening so I jumped back in the car and pottered around Warton for half an hour to make the miles up and begin my new life as a runner training in a more orthodox manner. Reaching the goal was a little anti-climactic. I was pleased and slightly relieved to have got there eventually but it was a very personal quest and not something I could share with others. I’m not sure how many crowns I have won overall as I have lost so many, then won others back and so on. The aim here was to hold 1000 simultaneously and I did exactly that. There was no celebration or fanfare. I debated taking a screenshot of proof of my achievement but it would just look underwhelming!
The segment to get me over the line was the charmingly titled “Dog Poo Bend”, a quarter mile blast into Austrey from Newton Regis direction. The following day I improved a couple of old segments, almost out of habit but since then I’ve not gone back. I’m sure I will when the weather is nicer, just for a bit of fun here and there but nothing obsessively as I had been doing for the last few years. I’ll still keep flagging the bike ride that gets recorded as a run to take half a dozen crowns off you but no longer do I take Umbridge when someone nabs one of my hard earned titles. They can keep them and well done I say. I’ve had my go. I just hope that this isn’t symptomatic of my attitude in months to come, that I have lost hunger and have effectively “peaked” and am now sliding into running retirement! I still want to win!
Chris Hortons Marathon Journey 