We’ve written tens thousands of words about the state of the sport so far in 2025, and we’ll write tens of thousands more after the upcoming World Champs. But every once in a while we need to write a navel-gazey, first-person essay—or at least I, Paul, do…So here’s an ode to being a big-time loser whose primary competitive outlet is “winning” an uncontested “battle” against Rory Linkletter that he had no idea was happening.

It wasn’t that long ago that a guy like me—a 30-something dad with two bum Achilles, well aware that his days of running PBs are in the past—would have scratched that waning competitive itch by taking local 5ks way too seriously. I’d have gotten slower and balder each year, with interesting new braces and exorbitantly priced shoes taking on more and more of the structural load.

Today, however, there is an alternative. Depending on your outlook, it’s either far more or far less dignified: being an unapologetic dork who attacks Strava segment leaderboards.

On this virtual battlefield, the modern weekend warrior can briefly half-step their local front-of-the-packer without the humiliation of DNFing before the mile mark while wheezing loudly and hacking up phlegm in a neighbor’s yard. As you dive into an all-out effort to snag a crown from a person who probably earned it by accident, you are technically alone. But in an exciting-slash-unnerving Metaverse, Tron-world way, you’re racing the digital avatar of every person who has ever trotted along a given route. And when you’re entering oxygen debt, your brain can no longer distinguish between kicking for the win at your state championship and beating out the ghost of 2:15 marathoners past on a randomly selected half-mile portion of the Prospect Park road loop. No matter how you recapture that feeling, it hurts to hurt, and it hurts so good.

When pursuing Strava segments becomes a primary motivator for your running, concepts like “warming up” and “cooling down” go out the window. I no longer need to concern myself with pedestrian metrics like “mileage” or “workout splits.” I’ve fully relinquished my athletic existence to an app, and in the process have untethered myself from the rigamarole that is structured training. On the days that I am not pushing my daughter in our jogging stroller, I often locate an attainable segment and aerobically self-flagellate for a few minutes.

This becomes particularly enjoyable on family vacations… specifically, when on family vacation in the Mecca of American distance running, Flagstaff, Arizona.

A few years back, after flying into Phoenix and driving up the mountain, I identified a gently downhill ¾ mile segment near where my wife and I used to live that Rory Linkletter had assumed ownership of that very morning. I was in the market to kick my own ass for a few minutes and figured it would be funny if one of the best Canadian distance runners of all time could only hold onto “Down to Thorpe" on Strava for six hours, so I went for it.

After just under four minutes of race-effort output, I split my watch and appreciated the metallic taste registering on my tongue. Still gasping for breath, I shuffled back to the car, where I uploaded my run and learned I’d dethroned Linkletter. Did it matter that Strava’s leaderboard showed his heart rate for the segment had been in the 120s, while mine was approaching 180? Who are you, my cardiologist?

Only after becoming the undisputed King of “Down to Thorpe”—a title that affords its holder very little in the way of respect, sadly—did I think of something. Back home in Brooklyn, if you snag a Strava crown, more often than not, its previous owner will simply take it back because they are much better at running than you and juuuust petty enough to care. But an athlete like Rory Linkletter has bigger fish to fry. His athletic successes are measured by top-10 finishes at World Marathon Majors, not by how many Strava crowns he possesses on a residential bike path. Surely a Paris Olympian isn’t going to adjust his training to reclaim an entirely meaningless title!

After our week in Flagstaff concluded, Linkletter hadn’t rebutted—on purpose or by mistake. And so two years later, back in town on a family trip a few weeks back, while my wife was relaxing and our daughter was napping, I Gollum-ly hunched over my laptop and muttered “my precious” as I scoured Flagstaff’s heatmap for segments topped by professional athletes that appeared to have been earned mid-recovery run. A few productive days later, we packed our bags and I left town with two more segment crowns up my sleeve, both of them dispossessed from professional runners who almost certainly won’t notice. Did it make me a better husband or father? No. Did it make me a better athlete? Also no. But it also didn’t make me worse, unless you fairly view this whole enterprise as petulant and self-serving.

It’s easy to look at the all-time results of a Strava segment and think they don’t tell the whole story. But when you see a civilian jabroni ahead of world class athletes, the story is a short one: “that jackass jogged for five minutes, sprinted for three, then walked back with a side stitch, inhaling deeply the brief stench of shamefully won glory.” It’s not glamorous, but it sure isn’t punching down.

So go forth and give yourself a shot at basking in that distinctive musk. Life affords you so few opportunities to come by an Uncle Rico moment honestly. And who knows? Perhaps the next enormous loser passing through town on the hunt for segment-based glory will pause briefly upon seeing your name ahead of Drew Bosley’s, smile to themselves in recognizing a Fellow Traveler, then take it from you. 

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