Feedback Wanted: Strava-Like Racing App

It would be cool to see enduro timing built in, with different stages and the overall times. Don't make it too complicated. Simple is better, and it has to be free for individual users. You won't grow a user base if people have to pay to use the basic version. Maybe the consumer level could be having a local race up to 10 or so riders is free, then the race organizer has to buy a license for running more people?

Definitely interested. Have you looked at the Garmin Edge MTB - that has something kind of baked in whereby it will allow you to setup gates and you can map out your times.. I think its only against yourself but could be interesting.

I would absolutey support a Strava alternative that listens to what riders (other than roadies) want as opposed to ignoring us - ie making segments private to only groups etc.

Also, happy to beta test.. (I'm slightly excited by the sounds of the app!)

I'd like try it out. 

No heatmap. Turn off your heatmap. Its default position is on. 

Friday night beer league racing is my favorite kind! 

Awesome, an underground racing app would be pretty fun. 

-Invite other riders, have the course open for a specified length of time, send out the results to all participants when the event closes. Have the means to run a series as well with leader board. Completely private.

-Have an easy way to mark the start and finish locations with GPS, I'll typically stake them physically with a flag. Riders know it starts and ends at the flags. The track is unique for each event and does not have to exist prior.

-Be able to easily add split times/locations to the track.

But will it be as (not) accurate as Strava? 

There was a local event a few years back that typically uses Webscorer with a starter and someone recording finishers. There was an issue and some of the times were lost so they went to Strava to try and use that for results. Strava and the real results did not match, for riders that had times from both Webscorer and Strava the finishing order was not not even close to the same. But the actual segment times were very similar.

I feel if you are relying on a mix of phones and Garmin GPS units for the timing it will never be accurate, so I guess it depends on how serious the Friday night racer crew is and how much they will be charged for the service.

I'd be interested in testing. For accuracy, you might add a baseline GPS tester to make sure a device has a good connection and also a way to see how devices GPS data is along a route. That could allow race owners to set a baseline for "good data" depending on how competitive they want it to be.

I noticed a massive drop in GPS performance when I changed phones recently and it really changes how Strava tracks my miles.

Sounds like a great project! Beyond MX and MTB, it could be applied to any outdoor distance sport - running, snowboarding/skiing, nordic ski, canoe/kayak, pub crawls, etc. 

The GPS accuracy thing is a concern for sure. If I record a track with my Garmin watch vs my phone, the tracks can differ substantially. This will piss some people off [Cat 3/4 roadies especially], even if it's not the app's fault. That said, if it's for beer league racing, maybe it won't matter.

I think one of the biggest (for me) would being able to quickly and easily create your own segments. I haven't thrown down the coin for the new Garmin Edge MTB, but that feature really intrigues me. The open sourced segments are better on Strava than Trailforks and Gamin but to be able to set exact and repeatable courses would be sweet, one of my local DH only tracks has a gnarly descent down to a creek but you climb back out, it's all one trail so your cumulative time for the DH and climb are what gets tracked on TrailForks, even though I only care about my DH time. 

I have also always loved the idea of an unofficial race series where stages get released on a Sunday night and you have a week to complete the stages for local bragging rights.  

Don't put your start / finish under trees? 

Do you actually mountain bike? 

Tell me you don't live in the BC without telling me you don't live in BC. Scratch the Sea to Sky and Vancouver Island off your potential user list if a course can't start or finish under trees. 

Very easy features I’d like to see.

easy way to reset leaderboards 

One button to start a segment/stage and one button to finish one.

Similar option for adding splits.

Easy connectivity for stop watch timing.  Guy at top hits start.  Guy at finish line hits stop.  Needs to allow for multiple racers on course.  While not perfect it’s better than gps timing.  Especially on the generally short tracks the east coast usually offer.  

While I don't really care about racing against my buddies (or myself) much anymore, I do agree with some of your premises. Strava is run by a bunch of lycra dorks, and hate mountain bikers.  I only keep using it for the Beacon thing so my wife can see how close I am to getting home.  Also, their data whoring for anti-MTB land managers is pretty gross (I turn heatmap stuff off but enough people leave it on that it's like shouting at a tornado).  From a "competing against myself" standpoint, its pretty annoying to check my time after a fast feeling run against my PR, see it's way off, then look at the GPS track and see that my "PR" track glitched about 100' down the hill for the second half of a run.

A few points I think people are missing the point on with this:  you're presumably just doing start/end gates, so the accuracy is less of an issue than if you were trying to match a GPS track against a segment (created by someone else's GPS track), plus all sorts of smoothing.  You could improve the accuracy of the reference start/end points within the app by making a button to collect data points for like 30 sec then average them (prompt user to hold the phone/Garmin still for that time).  Dealing with racer data accuracy is a different issue, but like Jeff said, it's just beer league racing.  You could probably still do some clever work-arounds to try to account for inaccuracy.

Other random thoughts:  if there's any system of comparing your own times, it'd be nice to be able to self-flag bad data tracks to ignore them, or ignore tracks older than a certain point (like if a trail gets rerouted), or only compare tracks against the same month(s) in previous years (summer vs. winter conditions).

Over COVID some motivated locals organized a Strava segment omnium race with one stage each of enduro, XC, road and gravel. Roughly 1 week to complete the stages then the best of each person's time on the given segments was taken for a total time. I think the segments were private to only the participants that replied to a FB group. No idea how much of a PITA it was to organize but it was a blast to participate in. This app would be perfect for this type of thing. 

It would be cool to have some type of hardware transponder or RFID type device for start finish accuracy but I imagine that just exponentially increases complexity and potential cost to implement. The relative inaccuracy could be a soft upside as it will encourage more of the intended "Beer League" vibe. +/- 0.5 to 1.25s is more than acceptable IMO. If the focus is on enduro people should be trying to make longer stage to encourage more field spread anyway. 

Very exited for the proposition of this. If you end up supporting android and iOS I would happily test it out with my crew. 

I was thinking about the stop watch part too.  Obviously just for fun racing can be run off a strava analog, but a slightly more official race it would be cool to have a feature like this.  

I have helped at a few races, I can't remember the system that we used, but essentially you had to find a racers number plate from a list and press it when they came across a line.  Because this was an enduro style event, no one started in any order, so you were having to do a number search in the 5s between when the rider came into view and when they crossed the finish line.  It sucked. It also was probably the leading cause for incorrect race data.

If the app on the racer was able to act like a timing chip in that it would know roughly when it passed by the start location, you could link that time data up with a course martial pressing start on their app.  Then the course martial wouldnt have to worry about linking start and stop times to rider numbers.  Same with the finish.  As the rider passes by the finish zone you could link up their rough time with when the finish marshal pressed stop. 

Sorry that was a long ass ramble.  

Either way Jeff, this sounds like a cool idea.  The different race types sound fun.  

Was thinking that if you intend to monetize it in some way.  Have a one time purchase for “organizers” and free use for “participants”. Basically to create a course, segment, or event (public or private) you need to pay a one time fee.  But if you just want to ride and get timed it’s free.  

Myself and a few others from my area would happily pay just to help organize our beer races and personal training.  Easily could get some people to chip in too.  But a subscription or small fee for the majority would be a big ask for everyone.

Oh and if you can incorporate trail usage data from your app, Strava, and trail forks into one place.  That would be a big help for anyone who needs to justify mountain biking to a land manager or is building trail professionally.

@jeff.brines I DM’d you about it! Can’t have the feds be lurking in the forums waiting to catch the real ones 👀

Awesome idea through and through. Will absolutely use the platform wether it be paid or free. The program would also be great for the individual user wanting to compare their times spreadsheet style for suspension testing, bike setup, and just general skills work! I could definitely see that useful if/when I start coaching again. Being able to easily time runs and track which lap is which (strava SUCKS at that) would be super helpful! 
My riding crew has been itching to run an intra group “race” on our local skidders. Doing so with a dedicated app and not requiring everyone to use/ pay for Strava premium would be a huge blessing! 

One gripe I have with Strava when using segments for "timing" "races" is the start speed. Obviously someone who bushwacks 30 feet up into the rough to enter the segment already going mach chicken is going to have an advantage, and there's no way to tell if the "winner" did that or started from a dead stop and just crushed the seg. 

Not sure if the solution would be building a "race mode" option to only count a run if the tracking started from 0 mph or utilize splits or something? But that's the main reason I don't take any Strava Club races seriously, there's just too many ways to game the system. 

Edit: re-reading that rant makes me realize there just needs to be start gate/timing wand functionality

I had a cool reply typed out but then it got janked when my phone thought I clicked on an ad. 

My main points were Strava is the current number one but i don't know many people who actually like it so it's ripe to loose users. My other point was the good old stopwatch crew might be your main " competition " or doubters at the moment. So being easier and more accurate than that method will be important. 

Finally Just an idea, and I'm really just spitballing here. I work as a survey tech and when we have to use GPS in thicker woods or swamps we'll set up a base GNSS that will correspond to our rover and provide more accurate and better coverage. The equipment we use is stupid expensive and would be cost prohibitive for sure, but I'm unsure of Garmins or others catolouge, maybe they make something less expensive that would work better and could connect to users phones in a meaningful way.

100% would support and beta test this. I dont think I would stop paying for strava but I would use it in conjunction without a doubt. My buddies are always taking the p*ss out of each other when it comes to segment times. Stoked to see how it evolves!

I probably type this twice a year in one forum or another and no one cares, but for the sake of persistence:  I've ridden trails with a middle-of-the-road Bad Elf GPS Booster (~$300; talking to something like 9 satellites) in +/- 200 ft elevation terrain in a fairly populated county (decent cell service) to lay down GPS tracks on Avenza for use in creating a trail map.  Multiple laps yielded lines that were in materially different places.  That's always made me highly suspicious of Strava's accuracy.

I applaud the initiative to do this and love the use case.  The fact it doesn't have the same accuracy as actual timing equipment isn't a problem.  But it'd be really nice if there was some quantification of the accuracy so you understand what you're getting.  Bro science would be totally acceptable.  

Results might mean no segments less than 3 minutes.  Might mean you use it for something like fastest run within this 10 day period, with the idea multiple runs will resolve accuracy issues.

I hate Strava, but I'd be interested in this.  Kudos and keep going!

After Strava's heavy handed launch of the new data usage policy last year I immediately ended my paid subscription and welcome a MTB focused alternative.  My needs these days are pretty basic but I’m happy to help and willing to beta test. 

Hey Jeff, I'll definitely sign up for some testing for you. 

My suggestions are this, have a countdown mode of 10s that detects rider movement to prevent people taking a rolling start, and also make it audible so you go at the beep. This is because most of us (me and my mates) ride with our phone in a pocket and not a Garmin, so we would hit the "race" button, slide the phone into the pocket. Countdown, hear the "go"  noise (id just straight copy BMX start noise as it's familiar) and start. 

The other thing I'd suggested is have a conditions grading, so when it saves your times (I'm presuming times won't be public or have a long term leaderboard), you can check what the conditions were for previous days. I'd have this set by the "race marshall" who creates the race, so he goes create race, sets the track, conditions= dry. Then everyone's logs will say dry and they can't fudge it themselves. 

I'd suggest just a few like Dry, Prime, Wet, Full Wet, or maybe fun names like loose, slimy, loamer, mud etc. 

I've been looking to start an unsactioned summer hot laps series with mates that will run on unsactioned trails, but freelap is incredibly expensive, we were honestly considering just using walky talkies and a stopwatch at the bottom so far, as it's the easiest and simplest, so this project is of particular interest to me. 

Personally what I'd love to see as a starting point is a strava alternative for recording rides and being able to have control over privacy for segments (to use their terminology..) From there I think you'd see a decent number of Strava users moving across. Where I live there are no official trails at all, everything is unsanctioned so when a new trail is built it tends to cause all kinds of worry about whether it'll be found and overused etc, because Strava segments are all or nothing.

Another request - segment length: Strava used to allow pretty much any length for a segment, they then changed this down to something like 400yds  minimum. Again due to local terrain that is almost impossible to achieve that in downhill.. (yeah its that bad). I appreciate that short segments bring in a greater degree of inaccuracy, but let us do it anyway, knowing that its not going to be as accurate as a 1 mile downhill segment.. We're ok with that.

Edit to add: I agree that somethings should be kept to being administered from a desktop browser - nothing worse that trying to use an app for complicated tasks when a browser would be far easier.

This is a big one. I recently have been building a mini-enduro trail network, meaning that really only the downhills are fun and worth timing, but the short trail length means that I can't create segments for the DH, and must include part of the climb. Older segments can still exist, but I can't create new short ones in Strava. 

In regards to flying starts vs standing starts, maybe you could do kind of an arming feature where you position yourself on the start, press a "ready" button and then the clock starts when you start moving. Again could be challenging with GPS jitter but removes the very annoying case where you accidentally rest inside the Strava segment before starting and ruin your time.

Ensuring that people don't accidentally trip the start or stop before the finish is critical. Providing a setup or best practice once that aspect is somewhat understood will be important. It may require some minimum GPS hardware spec and config as Jeff has been alluding to. App aside the GPS may be the cost of entry to get reliable results. 

The cross referencing of elevation data makes so much sense.  Sounds like you've already done a ton of homework and some really good thinking so far.

On rolling starts and GPS issues, when I played around with creating private Garmin segments for myself years ago, I'd always start the segment 50 feet or so from the actual start of the downhill run, figuring this helped make sure it didn't read me as having started the segment while I was sitting at the top.  Might be a creative solution consider.  Rather than trying to prevent people getting an advantage with a rolling start, just give everyone a rolling start.  Commissioner could do so this when they set up the segments.  Participants wouldn't even really need to be aware of it.