How to find KOMs on Strava (and which ones you can actually take)

Every Strava segment has a leaderboard, and the top of that leaderboard wears a crown. This guide covers where Strava keeps its segments and leaderboards, how to see the crowns you already own, and how to tell a KOM you can take from one you can only admire.

What a KOM and a QOM are

A segment is a stretch of road or trail that someone marked out on Strava: a climb, a sprint, a loop in the park. Every activity that crosses it lands on the segment leaderboard. The crown goes to the fastest athlete to date on the overall leaderboard: King of the Mountain on the leaderboard for men, Queen of the Mountain for women. Which one you compete for follows the gender setting in your Strava profile.

Second to tenth place get a trophy, and a new best time on a segment you already rode gets a PR medal. The laurel is a different prize: Local Legend goes to whoever matched the segment more times than anyone else in the last 90 days, however slow. Fast on one day beats steady on ninety. That is the game this guide is about.

Where Strava shows segments

On the Strava app, open the Maps tab in the bottom bar and pick Segments from the dropdown at the top left, under the search bar. The map shows the popular segments in the area you are looking at. Zoom, pan or type a place; the sport picker next to the search bar switches between riding and running, and the filters narrow the list by length, elevation and surface.

On the website, open Maps and choose Segments. Same map, same filters. There is also a search: click the search icon in the top navigation, choose Segments, and type a keyword or the exact segment name.

The cheapest source of segments is your own rides. On the website, open an activity and scroll past the map, or pick Segments in the menu on the left: every segment you matched is listed with your time. Select one to open its leaderboard. In the app, open the segment effort inside the activity; subscribers get Analyze Effort for the detailed view.

How to see your own KOMs on Strava

On the website, your profile page has a list called KOMs/CRs/Top 10s (QOMs/CRs/Top 10s on a women's profile). In the app, tap You in the bottom bar, then your profile picture, then Segments. The trophy case lives next to it: Trophy Case on the web profile, All trophies in the app.

Check the list after every ride. It is also where a crown quietly disappears when someone beats your time.

Why most KOMs are out of reach

Open the leaderboard of any famous climb near you. The top is pros, ex-pros and the odd national champion who rode it in a race. Below them: group rides, where ten riders rotated at 50 km/h and all logged the same time; wind days, when a 30 km/h tailwind added a minute nobody will see on a calm morning; and the occasional effort with a car in front that nobody flagged.

That is why a list of KOMs near me is mostly a museum. Famous segments are famous because fast people rode them. The ones worth hunting are quieter: a four-minute ramp on a road the group rides skip, a 90-second kicker with 200 attempts instead of 20,000.

How to pick a KOM you can take

Five rules of thumb, in the order that saves the most time:

• Start from your numbers, not the segment. If you ride with a power meter, your power curve shows your best watts over every duration; without one, your fastest efforts on segments of a similar length are a fair stand-in. Those durations are your weapons.
• Match length to strength. If your one-minute effort is a weapon and your twenty-minute is not, hunt 300 to 800 metre kickers, not 5 km climbs. Segment length divided by the KOM time is the speed you need; compare it with what you can hold for that long.
• Look at the gap, not the rank. KOM time against your best time on a segment of similar length and grade. Under 5 % apart: go on a good day. 5 to 10 %: go with a tailwind and a plan. Over 10 %: pick another segment.
• Grade decides the physics. On an 8 % climb the KOM is about watts per kilo; on a flat 2 km it is raw watts and a low position. Choose the terrain that suits your body.
• Read second and third place too. If first is 20 % ahead of second, that was a race or a wind day. The realistic target is the second time, and that one may be yours.

The shortcut

That is five rules for every segment on the map. Hunter KOM does the arithmetic for you: connect Strava, and it reads your riding history, builds your best efforts across durations and compares them with the current KOM and QOM time on every segment you pan over. Each segment gets a forecast of how close you are, so you see the ones within reach first and skip the museum.