The strange psychology behind chasing Strava KOMs

There's a particular madness that descends on a cyclist when they spot the little orange crown on their favourite climb. The legs are feeling reasonable after twenty minutes of warm-up, and then the phone buzzes with a notification: someone, somewhere, has reclaimed the segment. The heart rate climbs before the gradient does, and the rational brain starts negotiating with the irrational one about whether this is the day to throw down a serious effort on the local climb.

Most Australian riders recognise the feeling. Strava has woven itself into weekend riding culture, from Melbourne's Beach Road tempo sessions to the more analytical bunches tackling Mt Coot-tha before dawn in Brisbane. The platform turns every road into a potential leaderboard and every leaderboard into a quiet invitation to test yourself against strangers, mates, and the ghosts of riders who came before. What started as a training tool has become a sport of its own, played out in seconds and watts.

The KOM — King of the Mountain, though the title applies to any segment regardless of gradient — carries a peculiar weight. It is a tangible, ranked achievement, updated in real time, broadcast to a follower base, and indefinitely archived. It is the rare sporting accolade that exists entirely outside official sanctioning bodies, policed only by GPS accuracy and the occasional accusation of motor-pacing on a TT bike. For riders in Sydney's Northern Beaches, Adelaide's hills, or anywhere with a Strava-savvy bunch, this informal hierarchy has become as consequential as any race result.

Yet the obsession often sits oddly against the goals most recreational riders claim to hold. People say they ride for fitness, mental health, the coffee stop, the company. The segment hunter, however, is a different beast. The question worth asking is what is happening in the brain when a cyclist pushes a five-minute climb harder than any sensible training plan would suggest, simply because the orange crown is up for grabs.

The dopamine loop of digital achievement

Strava runs on what behavioural psychologists call a variable reward schedule, the same engine that powers slot machines. When you push a segment, you do not know whether you will beat your previous time, whether the wind will be kind, whether someone has just nicked the leader position, or whether you will land a new personal best. The notification might bring triumph, news of someone else overtaking you, or the rare pleasure of joining the elite group at the top of a local climb. Each push is a small wager with uncertain payoff, and that uncertainty is precisely what makes it irresistible.

The reward arrives in several forms. There is the physical sensation of crossing the segment end point, when the timer stops and the body finally eases up. There is the phone notification when the upload completes. There is the secondary thrill of seeing the segment pop up on every follower's activity feed, with the rider's name at or near the summit. For riders in Hobart staring down the Mt Wellington time trial, or those tackling longer climbs outside Perth, the digital layer adds an audience that did not exist when these climbs were first ridden seriously.

The trouble with variable rewards is that the brain adapts. The first KOM feels monumental. The tenth feels pleasant. The hundredth feels routine unless something dramatic happens — a new course record, a battle with a rival, an out-of-body effort that produces a time that surprises even the rider who set it. The chase escalates. Riders find longer segments, steeper segments, segments where the wind matters less, segments where the traffic lights align. The hedonic treadmill of segment chasing slowly accelerates, demanding ever more specific conditions to produce the original feeling of triumph.

Why KOMs land differently than personal bests

Plenty of cyclists keep meticulous training logs and chase personal bests in a structured way. Power-based intervals have targets, heart rate zones, and progressive overload built into their design. The KOM pursuit, by contrast, is unstructured and competitive, and that difference changes its psychological texture. A personal best on a training interval is a private victory, measured against yourself. A KOM is a public claim on a shared resource, defended or contested in full view.

This public dimension is what makes the loss feel disproportionate. Behavioural research consistently shows that losses weigh roughly twice as heavily as equivalent gains. When a rider wakes up to find their time on the Old South Head Road climb in Sydney has been beaten by eight seconds, the emotional cost is double the gain they would have felt earning those seconds. The eight seconds feel stolen, even when the new leader is a mate or a local legend whose name has only just appeared on the leaderboard.

There is also the matter of identity. Strava is, in many ways, a profile-as-performance platform. The activities on the page, the segments led, the routes completed — all of them shape how others see the rider and how the rider sees themselves. Holding a KOM on a respected local climb is a quiet badge of belonging. Losing it can feel like a small demotion, particularly within a tight-knit bunch where everyone knows who is quick on the climbs. For Australian riders, where cycling communities are small enough that the same names appear across multiple segments, the social stakes are unusually high.

The social comparison trap

Almost nothing about Strava is designed to make a rider stop comparing themselves to others. The platform's whole architecture — leaderboards, follower counts, kudos counts, segment rankings, the recent achievements carousel — invites comparison at every turn. The rider is always one tap away from seeing how they stack up against the rest of the field, and the temptation to look is constant.

This taps into what social psychologists call upward social comparison, which can either inspire or deflate depending on the gap between where you are and where the people above you are sitting. A rider twelve seconds off a KOM held by a former pro will likely respond with admiration. A rider four seconds off, held by a club mate who bought a new bike last month, will likely feel something closer to indignation. The closer the gap, the sharper the sting.

Australian cycling culture, with its mix of committed amateurs and a small professional class, makes these comparisons particularly volatile. The local hero on the Strava leaderboard is rarely anonymous — they turn up at the Tuesday bunch ride, they buy a coffee at the same café, they post the same training rides. Beating them, or being beaten by them, feels personal in a way beating an unknown username does not. The same psychology shows up in adjacent competitive communities, from local eventing competitions to amateur motorsport, where small rivalries in tight-knit groups drive the same obsessive behaviour.

Training versus segment hunting

The deeper tension in KOM chasing is the tension between training and competing. A planned training block builds slowly, deliberately, with rest weeks and progressive overload and the disciplined boredom of structured intervals. KOM chasing is opportunistic, weather-dependent, ego-driven, and frequently arrives at the cost of the very fitness that would make the KOM possible.

Smart cyclists learn to separate the two. They identify a few target segments for the season — perhaps Willunga Hill in the lead-up to the Tour Down Under, perhaps a long climb in the Dandenong Ranges for an end-of-season push — and build training blocks around them. The rest of the riding is done at conversational pace, with segment notifications left unread or, more honestly, glanced at and ignored. The disciplined approach works, producing times the all-or-nothing approach rarely matches.

The undisciplined approach is far more common. The rider goes out intending an easy recovery ride and ends up chasing a KOM on a short climb near home. The rider saves their legs all week for a Wednesday bunch ride and then spends the weekend going hard on a segment they could have left alone. Repeated often enough, the pattern produces staleness rather than fitness. The body stops responding, the motivation dips, and the KOMs become harder to take because the legs are simply not fresh enough.

Local realities of KOMs across Australia

The terrain across Australia produces wildly different segment cultures. In Hobart, Mt Wellington acts as a single dominant challenge, and KOM times become a measure of local cycling credibility. In Adelaide, the rolling climbs of the Adelaide Hills produce a dense network of short, punchy segments that reward repeated efforts. In Brisbane, year-round warm weather and humid conditions make KOM times notoriously weather-dependent, and the leaderboards shift with the seasons. In Melbourne, the spread of climbs from the You Yangs to the 1 in 20 produces an unusually broad leaderboard landscape, while Sydney's Northern Beaches and inner west provide a steady supply of short, contested segments.

The time zone differences across the continent also matter, particularly for global leaderboards. A segment time set in Perth at 6am is judged against riders in Europe who are still in bed, while a similar effort in Sydney competes against European riders who are mid-ride. This shapes which segments become globally competitive and which remain local affairs. It also shapes when Australian riders push their efforts — early morning is the global sweet spot, but local bunch rides have their own rhythms that do not always align.

Habits that actually help the KOM chase

A handful of habits consistently produce KOMs without the burnout that comes from relentless chasing.

• Picking two or three target segments per season and building training blocks around them rather than chasing everything
• Saving serious efforts for cool, calm mornings when wind and temperature are most favourable
• Using power meter data to confirm the effort matches current fitness rather than aspirational fitness
• Allowing two to three days between maximal efforts to prevent the staleness from cumulative fatigue
• Treating the off-season as genuinely off, with segment notifications left unread and KOM chasing paused entirely
• Riding with mates who set a sensible tempo and resist the urge to chase every challenge that appears on the route

Mindset shifts that often outperform training

A few changes in framing frequently do more for a rider's segment times than any specific training session.

• Reframing KOMs as training benchmarks, where the number matters less than the fitness it represents
• Accepting that some segments belong to specialists — climbers, time trialists, sprinters — and that chasing the wrong one is wasted energy
• Recognising that the loss of a KOM is a normal part of segment culture rather than a personal failure
• Distinguishing between KOMs that matter to the rider personally and KOMs that only matter because of the leaderboard
• Treating the ride itself, the company, and the weather as the genuine reward, with the segment outcome as a pleasant side effect

Most riders who chase KOMs seriously for more than a couple of seasons eventually arrive at some version of these conclusions. The ones who burn out tend to be the ones who never quite manage to separate the digital layer from the physical experience. The ones who keep improving tend to use the platform as a tool rather than a measure of self-worth. The orange crown will always be satisfying, but the road itself, and the body that rides it, are doing most of the work.

For Australian riders looking to find the bunch rides, hill climbs, and weekend events that turn solitary KOM chasing into something more communal, LetsRide.co remains the easiest starting point for locating local group rides and cycling events across the country.