Conquersize – Strava Needs Something Like This

Fetcheveryone.com is an interesting, fun and unusual community site for your sports data. But it’s what the site does with it that sets it aside from a site like Strava.

Fetcheveryone has the usual training logs, forums, plans and useful stuff like running calculators. It also has various games and leagues, and I just want to talk here about the Conquersize game.

Conquersize

The world is divided into a grid.

Each day you run, walk, cycle or swim in any square on the grid you get points and points are less for cycling, perhaps because it’s easier to cover more ground when biking.

This forms a personal heatmap on the grid.

An extension of the heatmap grants temporary ownership rights to the person with the most points in each and every square.

What Strava Should Do

Strava has vastly more users than Fetcheveryone.

Strava should use a similar technique on their segments, or even use the same grid as Conquersize. Except Strava should aggregate the points one level higher so that CLUBS or GROUPS we belong to are granted ownership. Tweeks shoudl be made to taper the scores off over time if the club fails to revisit grids and there should also be an extra scoring element when a certain threshold of contiguously-owned grids is met.

It should quite quickly emerge which active clubs ‘own’ the roads and paths near you. It will be impossible for a ‘malicious’ individual to get ownership of these areas but quite possible for a ‘malicious’ neighbouring club to take over the territory of the nearest and dearest arch rival…but that’s the whole point.

At this level, club rivalry and participation could be boosted and become a talking point in some circles.

Maybe a variation on this could be to see who owns racing venues like Eton Dorney or key routes or segments like Ride 100 and Box Hill?

However, the eventual national heatmap then might become either valuable or interesting for marketers. If you are launching a new product or service in one of Strava’s regions then the clubs that own the most territory may well be good ones to target.

Why Did This Spark My Interest

The latest press release from  Strava in the UK highlighted the growth and usage of their new HIKE sport recording. Strava flagged up these facts

• Ben Nevis is the most walked trail route on Strava in the UK
• The most popular day for hiking (so far) this summer was Thursday 2nd June, as the UK celebrated the first day of the Platinum Jubilee weekend by getting outdoors.
• The most active day for hiking, running and walking combined was Tuesday 21st June – the same day as strike action across the train and tube networks.
• Since the pandemic, the number of Strava users globally uploading hikes has tripled and trail sports including mountain biking, hiking and trail running are growing twice as quickly as those on pavement, such as road cycling.

I’m sure someone is interested in that stuff but I wasn’t. I’d be far more interested to see if my tri/running club owns more of my local roads than, say, Clapham Chasers or Full On Tri. Maybe that’s just me?