Feedback for Strava Challenges
As one of the most popular features on Strava, we hear a lot of feedback about Challenges and what our community would like to see in the future. Please use this forum to leave your thoughts on Strava Challenges and what we could do to make them better.
Let us know:
- What you think of the difficulty of our challenges
- Your favorite types of challenges (distance, time, elevation gain)
- Any feedback about the Challenge Gear offered
- What gets you the most fired up to complete a challenge
- If you have a great idea for a challenge theme
- What you think of the Challenge Discussion pages
If you need direct technical help with participation in a Challenge, or have a technical issue/question, please reach out to us directly by clicking "login" at the top of this page, then "Submit a Request".
Existing feature suggestions in our Community:
Create Group or Club Challenges
Create Strava Challenges for Beginners
More Strava Challenges for Elevation
More variety for Running Challenges
Multi-sport Strava Challenges
Thank you!
Comments
I think the MTS cycling challenges are good, but would like to see the sub-badges awarded at different levels than just the same 250km gaps every time. How about badges awarded at 100, 300, 600, 1000 and 1500km, as that way it should appease both those who complain that the challenges are too hard and those that say they are too easy - there'd be more badges at lower levels for those of us who don't get a chance to cycle every day, but for those who can, the highest badge is now even more of a challenge than it is currently.
Even if that's not possible, I would like for the highest sub-badge you achieve to appear in your Trophy Cabinet. I'll never manage 1250km in a month (unless I win the lottery and quit work), but I'm proud of the 8 x 250km months and the one 500km month I did manage, yet my cabinet does not reflect this.
Answer to any running-related challenges: Elevation.
That's all, thank you.
Disappointed that the 2 distances are not available this month! Thought it was a great idea especially for those short of time. Reading some previous posts maybe they should have been renamed. 100km fondo, 150km Gran Fondo and then add a third super gran fondo for 200km. I loved my woven badge for completing all 12 last year it is now framed with the post card that came with it. Maybe you should send out woven badges for each challenge completed. I would love to have all the colours displayed in one frame! Maybe make that a premium feature. The jerseys are expensive, but are also exceptionally good quality. You could use woven badges for the MTS series and climbing challenge.
Same as andrejs g, I am a member of a few of the Cape Town Based trail running clubs on Strava. We would love to have a Climbing/Elevation challenge for all us mountain runners. I know that trail running is a fast growing sport and many people from all around the world would love to enter such a challenge. I know we have been requesting it for months if not years but are feel as if we are being ignored. Is this the right platform to request such a challenge?
If so... it would be great to have a challenge similar to the MTS for runners where you could earn various badges for 2500 m in a month up to 5000m per month. Road runners would still be able to compete by running mountain passes.
Thanks Desmond
I think it would be nice to have 100k challenges for cyclists that are newer or short on time. I can't get out for the full Fondo but I could get out for a metric century once in a while.
When 2 different distances are offered in the same month it seems odd that 1 ride can complete 2 similar challenges. How about choosing which challenge each ride counts towards when uploading/saving? Or by default it goes against the longer distance entered, but it can be changed later on by the user. I don't think it would work if all rides under 150km count towards the 100 and all 150+ count against the 150 as people will just start cropping their rides to lead the 100. I like the variety of the challenges and am grateful for them. The only gripe I have with any of them is the elevation gain problem (discussed at length, every month!), which I appreciate being worked on and isn't easy to fix. Thanks strava - I'm enjoying the work you're putting into them all
I'd like to see a MTS in elevation for both disciplines, some of us prefer running the hills to the road, so we feel we're being left out compared to the distance runners/cyclists. I've been asking for this since I joined back in 2013, but all I see is more challenges showing up for distance. The strava community is growing, and fell runners like me are becoming bored of the same old distance challenges. I think a challenge 'how many metres can you climb in a month' would gain a big response, and after all...what's more challenging than going uphill?
Also...a lot of people such as myself live in areas where running on the flat is impossible. I live on a hill, surrounded by even bigger hills! And when I go on holiday, I like to run up even bigger hills! And if I was to go abroad...it would be even BIGGER hills!
Hi I was really enjoying the fact that there were two distance challenges for the grand fondo, Are you going to re instate them next month please.
My comments are all cycling based.
A few challenges would be awesome as ALL YEAR challenges (as in, they're open for the full 12 months). These could be:
Strava Races for Cycling - Achieve an average of 30km/h on a 100km ride. 35km/h, etc.
MTS Challenges - Should have permanent achievement badges in trophy case. I'm aiming for the 1250 every month this year, but it'd be cool to be able to see how others are progressing in their trophy cabinets.
Gran Fondo Challenges - It's good to have the multiple distances, however, why do it in multiple challenges? A single challenge with different achievement levels would work. 50km, 100km, 130km, 160km, 200km, etc. One badge in the trophy cabinet depending on the distance of the achievement. I don't need to spam my friends with "Michael joined 100km GF" "Michael Joined 150km GF" "Michael achieved 100km GF" "Michael achieved 150km GF" all at once. A single challenge would work great here.
Elevation Challenges - Again, multiple badges depending on elevation achievement.
"Summer of 1,000 Miles"
Start Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend (May 23rd) and go to Labor Day Monday in the United States. It's 109 days from start to finish. Try to get in 1,000 miles (~1,600km).
Badges every 125 miles (200 km) along the way.
So that would be:
125 miles (200KM) Badge #1
250 miles (400KM) Badge #2
375 miles (600KM) Badge #3
500 miles (800KM) Badge #4
625 miles (1,000KM) Badge #5
750 miles (1,200KM) Badge #6
875 miles (1,400KM) Badge #7
1,000 miles (~1,600KM Final badge, completed the challenge!!
1,000 miles of Summer
I would love to see a time field being added in the challenge leader board results as us fat bikers do long hours but short distances compared to mountain and road bikers.
Inserting time field would give a more even result for all kinds of cycling.
Like the idea of Frank to make a double and triple challenge, or just one month a 400km challenge.
The best Challenges are the Rapha ones, namely Rising and Festive 500. Bit of a dilemma, as would devalue these epic challenges if they were running every week...
However, I definitely would like the following with Challenges -
- More variety. Kept going on meaningless 80mile rides last year once a month to get the GF Badge. Do different distances/times/elevations each month to mix it up perhaps?
- Kit should be available (without shipping + taxes) in Europe. It all looks great, but never going to pay the current prices for it after having to pay £20 import tax on a £35 t shirt last time I ordered from Strava
- More brand partnerships and race specific challenges. Challenge to ride 250km the weekend of Paris Roubaix (250km race) for example?
- Make some really difficult ones
- Make some easier ones
- Reward those who complete the most. Eg 12x Gran Fondo badges = free t shirt?
My two cents:
- Challenges for beginners
- Overall distance/time/callory badge (get a batch when you ran 100km overall etc)
- Challenges within your own group
- Challenge a specific user (hey [name], i challenge you to beat my time on a 5k run)
Some really great feedback being shared on this thread!
Thank you to all who have participated in the discussion, and the Strava Challenges team in particular appreciates your thoughts, suggestions, and opinions. Please keep the comments coming.
Would it be possible to hide all challenges status updates? Personally I don't care for the many updates. If some subscribe at the end of the month I get 4 notices in a row.
Or put them in a seperate tab?
Slightly offtopic: Activity feed filter would be good, so you can follow someone, but also hide their updates in the newsfeed. You can also choose to filter Challenges updates.
How about being able to Filter Challenge Results to display "miles" in lieu of "kilometers"--especially at the "my clubs" level? Here in the USA it just makes more sense.
5K / parkrun challenge would be a fun one as you have linked with parkrun now
It would be cool to have some long term / big picture running challenges similar to the ones that people set themselves:
- Go for a run/HM/marathon on every continent (maybe separate ones for including or excluding Antarctica), or every state/province of a few countries (Australia, Canada, US), or Europe
- Run in 5/10/15/20/+ different countries
- Generic challenges for running in a different cities - you could try picking some famous routes based on movies, books, sporting events, wars? Something a bit different. For example: Phineas Fogg challenge based on Around the World in 80 Days - run in London, Paris, Suez, Mumbai, Kolkata, HK, Yokohama, San Francisco and NYC.
- X lifetime marathons/HMs
Others would have other ideas, this is just off the top of my head.
(I'm a biker, but I imagine this would apply to all) There aren't enough challenges per month, especially for riders that don't ride long distances at a time, or who don't live in hilly places.
I understand the point of it being a challenge is making it hard, but for a lot of people, the few challenges available are just flat out impossible. I live in Chicago (very flat) and ride mostly for transportation and many would say I ride "a lot", but I start to feel like perhaps I'm not the right demographic for Strava aside from a GPS service when I can only really participate in the MTS challenge, and even then I dont even remotely stack up and its more for the feeling of general participation as opposed to feeling like I'm actually competing in any way.
If you are interested in broader demographics then there should be more options and broader challenges for different levels, or even lifelong challenges you can attain once instead of monthly. short burst challenges for commuters and track riders. Challenges for the number of times you ride per day/week/month. There are a lot of great ideas in the other comments and they should all be implemented.
The main point is there needs to be more challenges at once. The more challenges, the better!
It just seems like a big loss in an opportunity to build an exciting, interactive community that would engage new and experienced bikers to get out there and have fun.
Otherwise great service!
Thank you!
Great to see an ascent challenge for runners! (Dipsea)
I appreciate not everyone lives in mountainous areas but this really is a feature I hope becomes a regular monthly challenge. Maybe something in the ballpark of 5,000m a month with increment badges en route.
Saw a suggestion somewhere for 4 weeks to climb 29,029ft (Everest). I'd certainly be up for that, too!
I find the challenges are too geared towards serious athletes - and certainly recognise there's a lot of people aren't ever going to get anywhere near some of the challenge badges. For other people, the badges aren't even a challenge.
I would like to see some badges based on improvement - ones that look at your performance or volume in a previous month then require you to improve by a percentage. For some of these they would actually be *harder* for more serious athletes to earn - for example, it might be "Take 3% off your best 20km ride" or "Increase your best 5 minute power by 5%" - something which for a beginner is quite a good goal - but as we all know as you get faster, small gains get harder.
Also, elevation challenges are a pain for anyone who lives where it's flat.
Other challenges should perhaps not involve distance - something like an "all-day hit-out" badge might be one where your ride has to start before 6am and have 4 or 6 hours of moving time, regardless of the distance covered.
I also feel like you could team up with some major events or national sporting organisations. You don't want to devalue it by offering it to too many events, but for example, we have the Australian MTB Marathon Championships coming up in 2 weeks time - how cool would a "Completed the Australian Marathon Championships" badge be? Maybe limit it to UCI-listed XCM events at CN or XCS at S1 level?
An idea for a challenge is to record a run in each of the 24 hours of the day. All runs have to be in the same time zone. Some minimum run duration would be sensible e.g. 20 minutes. Badges at 6, 12, 18 and 24 hours. Special badge when a run is recorded that starts after 12 midnight and finishes before 5am (everybody completing the challenge will get one but for a partial completer this would be an incentive to get out at night). If somebody completes the challenge in more than one time zone they will get a special badge for the 2nd and each subsequent time zone, i.e. TZ2, TZ3 badges. The challenge could last for a calendar month. Obviously the month chosen will have a big effect on the amount of running the dark, and if it was held in the winter months it would be more of a challenge than when held in the summer.
From a cycling perspective, I was wondering whether creating a challenge that integrated distance and elevation (i.e. distance x elevation) would be possible?
A 50km ride with 1000m of climbing is more challenging that a 50km ride with 400m climbing. Integrating by multiplication distance and elevation in these examples would give "scores" of 50,000 and 20,000 respectively. The high values of these numbers are a little unwieldy, but since the units are arbitrary you could just divide by 1000 (say) and have an "integrated ride score" (or something) of 50 and 20, respectively. My understanding is that this wouldn't detract from the "suffer scores", but would highlight those doing long rides in hilly terrain.
Other thoughts are to add MTB/road/cyclocross/etc, tags to rides so that the challenges can be filtered according to those tags. Riding 1000km in a month on a mtb is a lot harder than 1000km on a road bike (especially in the winter when the mud is out...).
The activity feed needs to be re-designed because all I can see are the challenges people are signing up to, and I can't see the activity feed.
The people I'm following are very active which says a lot for just how much the challenges push their activities down the window. As a suggestion, there could be a way of filtering the activity feed so challenges are not displayed or, the challenges come up in a different part of the activity feed.
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