Ride sources
Strava tracks distance. Your fork is specified in hours.
Strava already knows how far you rode and which bike you rode it on. That is most of the raw material for a maintenance clock, and it is why so many riders start by trying to use it. The gap is not effort, it is units: suspension manufacturers publish hours, Strava gear tracks distance, and no honest conversion exists between them.
What Strava's own gear tracking does
More than people give it credit for. You can register bikes and components, Strava accumulates distance against them as you ride, and you can set a distance-based reminder. For a chain, that is genuinely most of what you need - chains do wear against distance, and a wear checker settles the rest.
Where it stops:
| What a service clock needs | Strava gear |
|---|---|
| Distance per component | yes |
| A reminder at a distance you choose | yes |
| Hours as a separate axis from distance | not as a component clock |
| Manufacturer intervals per brand and model year | you supply the number |
| Calendar intervals (brake fluid, sealant, bearings) | not distance-based, so out of scope |
| eBike motor hours | no motor connection |
None of that is a criticism. Strava is a ride log that happens to count gear distance; it was never meant to be a workshop record.
Why hours and distance are not interchangeable
FOX, RockShox and Öhlins publish fork and shock intervals in operating hours - 50 h for lowers, 100 to 200 h for a full service depending on brand and tier. Two riders can cover the same 60 km and put very different hours through a fork. A shuttle day adds distance with almost no fork time; a technical two-hour loop adds fork time with very little distance.
So a distance-based fork reminder is not a slightly rough version of the real interval. It is a different measurement that happens to correlate on some rides. The published figures per manufacturer are here.
On an eBike this gets worse. Motor torque puts load through the drivetrain and suspension that a rider's own moving time does not represent. If your bike has a Bosch motor, the motor's own hour meter is the honest clock, and Loam reads it directly - see how that works.
Closing the gap
Loam connects to Strava with read-only access, scores each ride against the bike it belongs to, and runs whichever clocks the manufacturer actually specifies for each component - hours for suspension, distance for drivetrain, months for fluids, ride count where that is the axis. You keep riding and logging in Strava exactly as you do now.
- Per-ride, not a running total. Only rides newer than a bike's last checkpoint move its clock, so a re-sync cannot double-count.
- One clock per bike. If a bike is fed by Strava it is not also fed by Health or files, because two sources on one bike is how a ride gets counted twice.
- Indoor rides are opt-in. Trainer distance is real wear on a drivetrain and meaningless for a fork, so it is yours to include or exclude.
- Your garage stays on your phone. No Loam account. Backup, if you turn it on, is encrypted before it leaves the device.
Disconnecting, and why you should ask about it
When you disconnect Strava, Loam deletes every Strava-derived figure from the device and flushes the cloud copy, while keeping the service history you entered yourself. That behaviour is required by Strava's API terms, and it is a fair question to ask of any app you connect: what happens to the derived data when I leave? Ours is documented in the privacy policy.
Weighing this against other trackers? Our comparison page says where Loam is the wrong choice, including the cases where a hosted account beats a local-first one.
FAQ
Does Strava track bike maintenance?
It tracks distance per bike and per component and can remind you at a distance you set. It does not hold manufacturer intervals, does not track hours as a component clock, and has no motor connection for eBikes.
Do I need to change how I record rides?
No. Keep recording in Strava and assigning rides to the right bike - that bike assignment is what the whole thing hangs on.
What if some rides are on a bike Loam does not know about?
Rides only move the clock of a bike you have linked, so an unlinked bike's rides are simply not counted rather than being attributed to the wrong bike.
Put your Strava rides on a real service clock
Free, no Loam account, read-only Strava access, and disconnect deletes what it derived.
