Background
Since Outside Inc. acquired FastestKnownTime.com in March 2022, concerns about gatekeeping and opaque decisions have grown. I spent a lot of time investigating and measuring what the route standard actually produces, rather than arguing about how it feels. What follows is what the measurements support.
The first five asks are backed by evidence you can check. The last two are positions I hold on principle, and I mark them as such rather than dressing them up as findings.
1. Publish the numbers
Release annual figures on submission volumes, approval and rejection counts for routes and for records, as well as the reasons given.
2. Delete the rule that penalizes routes for being where people run
The guidelines say: “Some areas are already well represented on the FKT map; the standard for new routes in these areas will be higher than in areas with no or few FKT routes.”
Crowded areas are crowded because people run in them. Density is the clearest signal of local demand the platform has, and this sentence instructs editors to read it as evidence of the opposite.
3. Replace the notability test with eligibility conditions
The guidelines ask whether a route is “notable and distinct enough that others will be interested in repeating it.” That is a forecast, and every approved route is a record of how the forecast turns out. Among routes approved five or more years ago, 8 percent have never been run and 28 percent have been run at most once. Those are the ones where the judgment was made in the route’s favor and has had half a decade to come true.
I looked for a better predictor and did not find one. Given a route’s distance, elevation gain, and how many routes already sit nearby, a statistical model beats chance only slightly, and knowing nothing except how long a route has been listed does better than knowing everything measurable about the route itself.
Rejecting a route wrongly costs an athlete a record they cannot appeal, while admitting one wrongly costs a page nobody visits, and the site is already carrying more than a thousand of those without harm to anyone. Exclusion has to earn its place against that asymmetry, and predicting demand accurately would not be enough to earn it.
So the notability test should go, and be replaced by conditions a stranger could apply and reach the same answer: a GPX track is supplied; the start and finish are named features or stated coordinates that someone who has never been there could locate; travel along the line is legal, requiring no trespass and no permit unavailable to the public; the line is not a duplicate of an existing route, defined numerically rather than by judgment; and it meets the distance or elevation minimum already published. Everything else, distance, gain, surface, permits, technical grade, gets recorded and displayed so athletes can filter for themselves.
See the proposed rubric.
4. Give every rejection a written reason and somewhere to take it
Every refusal should cite the specific condition that was not met, in writing. A submitter should be able to ask for that decision to be looked at again by someone who did not make it, within a stated time.
This follows directly from the previous ask, and it is why eligibility conditions matter more than better criteria. An appeal is only possible when both sides are looking at the same question and can disagree about a fact. Against a judgment of taste there is nothing to appeal.
5. Apply the rules consistently, and publish what they are
The guidelines concede that they are not applied uniformly: “We recognize that not every route will meet all of these standards, but this is what we will aim for.” Meanwhile 31 published routes clear neither half of the one numeric minimum on the page.
What I also believe
Editorial authority should be spread wider. Multiple reviewers per region, rotation, and published selection and conflict-of-interest policies.
The community should have a formal voice. An elected athlete advisory board with real input on policy. The case for it is that editorial judgment about what the community wants has diverged measurably from what the community actually runs.
The record should stay free. FKT records are a historical record of an amateur sport, built by volunteers and athletes. They should remain accessible without a subscription regardless of what Outside Inc. decides commercially.
What I am contributing
Criticism is cheap, so I have built a few tools that I think are missing and will serve the community. All three run in the browser, store nothing, and are free to use.
Route difficulty
Give it a GPX file and it returns a difficulty score built from distance, elevation gain, and the distribution of grades along the line, using the published metabolic cost curves for uphill and downhill travel. It scores the route, not the runner, which is the right unit for something many people will attempt.
Try the route difficulty scorer
FKT scoring
Scores a single attempt by combining the route’s difficulty with the style, the team size, and the time relative to the previous record. It is a way of asking how much a given run actually demanded, rather than only how fast it was.
FKT portfolio scoring
Takes an athlete’s body of work and reports three separate numbers, for quality, volume and range, deliberately not combined into a single figure. Combining them would require deciding how much a hard route is worth against a large number of easy ones.
A word on what these tools are not. They are demonstrations of what FastestKnownTime.com could implement, not a competing platform. The style and team multipliers in the ranking tools are design choices rather than empirical findings, and the tools say so on their own output.
Where to go from here
The data behind these claims sets out every figure, what it shows, and where it is uncertain.
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. Reports are reviewed before anything is published, individual reports are never published in full, and no editor is ever named.
Join the discussion if you agree or disagree with any of this.
Why this matters
FKTs came out of the idea that anyone could test themselves on any worthy line without an entry fee or a gatekeeper. Four in five people who have ever proposed a route proposed exactly one. They have no standing, no relationship with an editor, and no reason to come back after a refusal with no reason attached. A discretionary process costs them the most.
I recognize the volunteer labor that sustains FastestKnownTime.com and I am not asking for less curation out of hostility to it. I am asking for curation that a submitter can understand, check, and argue with. These changes would strengthen the record rather than weaken it.