FKTorNOT
Community Advocacy for Transparent FKT Standards
FastestKnownTime.com is the definitive record of trail running and hiking speed attempts worldwide. It is also the arbiter of which routes are allowed to exist in that record, and it decides that behind a standard no submitter can be appealed against.
I went and measured what that standard produces.
44% of approved routes have been run once or never. The platform describes itself as a bucket list of the best routes in the world. Nearly half of that list has never been repeated by anybody.
The guidelines raise the bar in exactly the places where routes get used most. They say so outright: “the standard for new routes in these areas will be higher than in areas with no or few FKT routes.” In the thinly covered areas where the bar is lower, a third of routes are never attempted. In the crowded areas where it is higher, one in eight. The policy is inverted.
The one rule with a number in it is not applied. Routes must be five miles long or climb five hundred feet. 31 published routes clear neither, while submissions that clear both are refused on grounds nobody outside the platform can check.
Acceptance depends on persuading a person, and the guidelines say so. “Understand that acceptance will depend on persuading your regional editor that your route qualifies.”
What I’m proposing:
- Publish the submission and rejection numbers.
- Delete the sentence that penalizes routes for being where people run.
- Replace the notability test with eligibility conditions a stranger could apply and reach the same answer.
- Give every rejected submitter a written reason and somewhere to take it.
Why it matters
FKTs came out of a simple idea, that anyone should be able to test themselves on any worthy line without an entry fee or a gatekeeper. Four in five people who have ever proposed a route to the site proposed exactly one. They have no track record, no relationship with an editor, and no reason to try again after a refusal with no reason attached. Those are the people a discretionary process costs the most.
What I am contributing
Criticism is cheap, so I have also built the tools I think are missing and would serve the FKT community.
- A proposed route rubric.
- A route difficulty scorer that reads a GPX file and rates the line rather than the runner.
- An FKT scoring tool that weighs an attempt by style, team size and the record it was chasing.
- And a portfolio scorer that reports an athlete’s overall quality, volume and range as three separate numbers, because collapsing them into one would require a judgment nobody has earned.
These are demonstrations rather than a competing platform. They run in the browser, and they store nothing.
Where to go from here
Check out what the data says.
Report a rejected route if a submission of yours was turned down,
or if you decided not to submit one because you expected it would be.
Join the discussion if you agree or disagree with any of it.
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