Founding Riders
Turn years of riding into something other cyclists can use.
Your Strava history holds hundreds of rides other cyclists will never find. Contribute it and help build a global library of real routes, ridden by real cyclists.
Help build the world’s best library of great bike rides
You’ve spent years finding great roads, trails, climbs and routes.
Most of those rides are buried deep inside activity histories where other cyclists will never discover them.
Cyclists.com is building a global library of great rides based on routes cyclists have actually ridden - not routes an algorithm drew.
You can help by contributing some or all of your cycling history. We only need the route itself. We don’t need your heart rate, power, cadence or any other performance data.
What comes out of an archive is the riding other cyclists are looking for: the good roads around a city, the climbs, the gravel, the quiet way between two towns, the stages of a tour, the ride to do on a Sunday in a place someone is visiting for the first time.
Not every activity becomes a route. Indoor rides, broken recordings and the same loop ridden three hundred times do not need pages — we look through the archive for the riding that does.
Completed a cycle tour? Bring the route with you. Upload your Strava archive or GPX files, choose the stages from your trip, and turn the tour into something other cyclists can discover and ride.
How it works
Five steps. The first is yours, the middle three are ours, the last is everyone's.
- 1
Export your Strava history
Strava will email you an archive of your own account. It is requested from a browser, not the phone app - the instructions are two clicks away.
- 2
Upload it
Your browser reads the archive before anything leaves your computer, so you see what is in it and choose what to contribute.
- 3
We find the rides worth keeping
Not every activity becomes a route. Repeats of the same roads collapse into one, indoor and broken recordings drop out, and what remains is measured: climbs, surface, places, stops.
- 4
Your rides help build the library
What survives becomes route pages other cyclists can find - credited to you, or to "a Cyclists.com rider" if you would rather.
Where we need riders
We're building Cyclists.com region by region. If you've ridden extensively somewhere we don't yet cover well, your archive is worth more here than almost anywhere else.
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Hungary
Singapore
Mauritius
Slovakia
Why contribute?
Preserve your best rides
Turn years of cycling history into a permanent collection rather than leaving everything buried in an activity feed.
Help other cyclists
Give riders confidence that a route has actually been ridden by people like them.
Build your rider profile
See the routes, regions and countries you have helped map.
Become a Founding Rider
Early contributors become part of the group that helped create Cyclists.com.
Contribution rewards
Some archives may qualify for a contributor reward
We’re particularly interested in cyclists with substantial riding histories in places Cyclists.com barely covers. If your archive would make a real difference to the library, we may offer a reward — usually an Amazon gift card.
Rewards are offered selectively, after review, based on how useful, unique and geographically valuable an archive turns out to be. Uploading does not earn one.
Most contributions carry no payment at all, and the people we most want to hear from are the ones who would contribute regardless.
- A valuable local archive~$25
- Strong regional coverage~$50
- Extensive touring or multi-region$50–$75
- Exceptionalup to $100
Founding Riders
The first generation of the library
We’re inviting an initial group of cyclists from around the world to help create the first generation of the Cyclists.com ride library.
We’re looking for cyclists who have accumulated great rides over the years and are happy to help other riders discover them.
Early contributors will be recognised permanently as Cyclists.com Founding Riders.
Every route you contribute says Ridden and contributed by you - or, if you prefer, Contributed by a Cyclists.com rider. You can switch at any time.
Your privacy comes first
Cyclists.com is interested in the route you rode, not your personal performance data. Before a ride is published we create a sanitised Cyclists.com route and remove everything that isn’t needed.
We will never deliberately publish your home location.
Every start and finish is checked for signs of a home and cut or obscured when it looks like one. Trailheads, stations, cafés and car parks are left alone. You preview the public route before it goes live.
- Heart-rate data removed
- Power data removed
- Cadence removed
- Activity timestamps removed
- Device information removed
- Calories and performance metrics removed
- Sensitive start and finish locations checked
Source activity → Cyclists.com route
Bring your cycling history with you
Wherever it lives today. Strava is one source among several - and we never connect to your account.
Strava archive
ReadyGPX
ReadyFIT
ReadyTCX
ReadyGarmin
Coming soonRideWithGPS
Coming soonKomoot
Coming soonWahoo
Coming soon
What happens to contributed rides
Nothing goes into a black box. Your dashboard shows each step as it runs.
- 01Reading your archive…Every activity is listed - you see the count before anything is uploaded.
- 02Finding cycling activities…Runs, walks and indoor sessions are set aside. Commutes are yours to include or not.
- 03Protecting privacy…Timestamps and sensor data are dropped. Residential-looking starts and finishes are cut.
- 04Checking for duplicates…Your repeats of the same loop become one route. Roads other riders have contributed join theirs.
- 05Creating new routes…Each new route gets its climbs, places, stops and a written description, then a page of its own.
This isn’t another fitness tracker
Cyclists.com isn’t interested in how fast you rode. We’re interested in where you rode.
No leaderboards. No performance comparisons. No pressure to publish personal fitness data.
We’re building a discovery platform for great cycling routes.
Cyclists are building this
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Questions riders ask
- Do you need access to my Strava account?
- No. For Strava, you download your own archive and upload it to Cyclists.com. We never ask for your Strava password and we do not connect to your account.
- Will my heart rate, power or speed be published?
- No. Cyclists.com only keeps the route and the information that describes it - distance, climbing, surface, the places it passes. Performance data is removed before anything is stored as a route.
- Will people be able to see where I live?
- We check every start and finish for signs of a residential location and cut or obscure the first and last stretch when it looks like a home. Starts at trailheads, stations, cafés and car parks are left intact. You can preview the public version before it goes live, and "Hide my exact start and finish" is on by default.
- Do I have to publish my name?
- No. You can contribute anonymously: routes then say "Contributed by a Cyclists.com rider". You can switch between public and anonymous later.
- Can I choose which rides I contribute?
- Yes. Before uploading you choose the kinds of riding to include (road, gravel, mountain biking…), leave out commutes and indoor sessions and set a minimum distance. After processing you can exclude whole countries or remove individual routes from your dashboard.
- What happens if someone else uploads the same route?
- That is useful. Several riders’ traces of substantially the same roads become one Cyclists.com route, credited to everyone who rode it. The number of cyclists behind a route will eventually help show how established it is.
- Can I remove my routes later?
- Yes. You can remove a contribution from your dashboard. Your attribution and your activity data are removed; a route that other contributors or open data also support stays on the site without you.
- Can I add comments or photos?
- Yes, and it is the most valuable thing you can do. Every route has an optional "Anything another cyclist should know?" note - the café, the junction to watch, the climb that is worse than it looks - and you can add photos to routes you have ridden.
- What file formats do you support?
- A Strava archive zip, GPX, FIT and TCX files, or a zip of those. Garmin, RideWithGPS, Komoot and Wahoo can all export to one of these today; direct imports come later.
- What about activities I kept private on Strava?
- You need to know exactly how this works, because it is the one thing we cannot do for you: a Strava bulk export does not record which activities were private. The file says nothing about who could see an activity, so we cannot detect it and cannot filter on it. What you control instead: you choose which kinds of riding to contribute and a minimum distance before uploading, you can have routes land as drafts and publish them one by one after looking at each page, and you can remove any route or the whole contribution at any time. If particular rides must never appear, leave that kind of riding out at the selection step.
- Will every activity I upload become a public route?
- No, and most will not. Indoor and virtual rides, activities without a usable GPS trace, and anything below your chosen minimum distance are set aside. Rides that cover substantially the same roads as one another - the training loop you have ridden 300 times - become a single route, not 300 pages. A typical archive produces far fewer routes than it holds activities, and that is the point.
- What happens to my commutes and repeated training loops?
- Commutes are excluded by default and are yours to include if you want. Repeats are matched against each other and against routes already on the site by comparing the roads covered, so the library gains one good page per route rather than a pile of near-identical ones. The extra recordings are kept privately as evidence that a route is real and well ridden; they are never rendered as pages.
- Will I definitely receive a reward?
- No. Most contributions carry no payment, and uploading does not entitle anyone to one. Rewards are offered selectively, after review, based on how useful, unique and geographically valuable an archive turns out to be. If money is your reason for being here, please treat it as unlikely rather than likely.
- How do you decide whether an archive qualifies?
- After processing we can see what the archive actually produced: how many routes it created that did not exist, how much of it duplicated what we already had, which countries and regions it covers, whether it contains point-to-point touring, and how thin our coverage was in those places beforehand. Those measurements are scored, we look at the result ourselves, and we get in touch if we would like to offer something.
- Can I contribute without a reward?
- Yes, and most people will. The recognition is real: your routes carry your name, your rider profile shows what you have added, and early contributors keep Founding Rider status permanently.
- What happens to my photos?
- Photos in a Strava archive are considered for the route pages they belong to: landscape shots of the road and the place, credited to you in the gallery. Photographs of people are used sparingly and never as the main image on a card. We show them on Cyclists.com - we do not sell them, license them onward or use them for anything else - and removing your contribution removes them.
Become a Founding Rider
Bring your cycling history to Cyclists.com. It takes a few minutes, and the routes you’ve found get a permanent home.