Segments

A segment is a stretch of ground you cover again and again — a climb, a descent, a flat stretch, a short sprint. The ground doesn't change between visits, so when your time on it changes, that's you changing. It is one of the cleanest ways to see whether your training is working.

You don't create segments

We find them for you. After every activity with GPS, we look for climbs, descents, flats and sprints in your track, and we check your track against the segments that already exist around it. A pass counts as an effort on a segment when:

• You stayed on it — your GPS points are within 30 m of the segment's line
• You covered it — the pass runs along at least 85% of its length
• You did it in one go — leaving the line for more than 250 m ends the pass
• The distance makes sense — a pass under half or over double the segment's length is treated as a GPS error and dropped

Indoor sessions have no GPS track, so they never produce segment efforts. Going up and coming down the same hill are the same segment in two directions, and your times are only ever compared within one direction. Efforts we flag as unclean are left out of your best times and every ranking.

Your numbers

On screen	What it means
Your best	Your fastest time here, ever. One effort, not an average
Typical (90 days)	The middle of your times here over the last 90 days — half were faster, half slower
Trend	How many seconds a week your time is changing, fitted across the last 90 days. It needs 5 efforts in that window. Less than half a second a week reads as flat
Your efforts, last 12 months	The chart on a segment's page. It shows the past 12 months only, with your best and your latest effort marked

A segment appears under Mine once you have two efforts on it.

Put your latest time next to your typical one, not your best. Your best was one great day; typical is what a normal day here looks like for you right now.

How one effort is read

Every read of a single effort compares it with your own history on this segment, in the same direction:

• The ranking — "your third-fastest here" counts only your own efforts
• Seconds off — this effort against your fastest one here
• Under 3 seconds — counts as the same time. A gap that small is timing and GPS noise
• Heart rate — compared only when both efforts recorded it. Within 3 bpm we treat them as the same effort, so a slower time at the same heart rate points at your legs, not your lungs. The same time at 6 bpm or more above your best means it cost you more to get there

Compared with other athletes

Every ranking uses each athlete's best time on the segment, so one athlete never appears twice.

• Your standing under Mine — where your best sits among everyone who has run this segment, as the front, middle or back third. It only appears once at least 5 athletes have run it; before that you'll see that nobody else has run it yet
• Runners like you — on a segment's page, the athlete just ahead of you and the one just behind you in your age group. It needs your birthday on your profile and at least 5 athletes in your age group on this segment
• "Your PR would put you…" — the place your best time takes in that age group. We show it only when we have the whole group, so it is a real position, not an estimate
• All leaderboards — the same segment ranked other ways: everyone, age group, gender, weight class, adjusted for weather, this year, this month (the last 30 days), most efforts and most improved over 90 days, and efforts started before 7:00. The age, gender and weight boards need that field on your profile

What to do with it

• Watch the trend across a training block, not one effort. A single slow day says little; a trend that keeps moving says your training is doing something
• Record heart rate. Without it we can only compare the clock, not tell a slower day from a harder one
• Run a familiar segment easy now and then. At the same heart rate as before, a faster time is fitness you can see
• Turn on live segment coaching in Settings. While you record, it tells you when a segment you've run before is coming up, then how far ahead of or behind your best pace you are