Six distance categories. Six. From sub-100 km weekend runs all the way to Touring 2, which is anything beyond 4,000 km. Most ride logs use a blank text field labeled "distance" and then get abandoned after the third entry.
The distinction matters when you're trying to recommend a route to a club member who just passed their CBT versus a rider who's done three Iron Butt events. The same road described as a "great 280km loop through the hills" is either a satisfying day out or a warmup, depending on who's reading.
The Record That Earns Its Keep
Start and End Location fields use GPS coordinates, not text descriptions. When you wrote "turn left after the old farmhouse" three years ago, the farmhouse has since been replaced by a housing development. The pin doesn't lie.
Road Quality Rating runs from one to five stars. This is the field that makes the database worth maintaining past the initial enthusiasm. After three months and forty entries, filtering for 4-star-and-above routes under 300 km with Skill Level 3 or below produces a curated list that took no effort to generate because the data was entered while the ride was still fresh.
Required Equipment is the field most riders initially skip and then come to appreciate. The B-road run through the mid-Wales pass that requires intermediate off-road capability in the last 15 km after the tarmac runs out. The mountain route that's genuinely impassable without winter tyres from November through March. The overnight touring loop where there's a 200 km stretch without fuel availability above 300 km/h pace. These aren't notes — they're conditions.
The Notes field is where the real riding intelligence lives: the layby at kilometer 87 with the view and the good coffee van on weekends, the section where the road surface looks fine but has a concealed dip that unloads the front at 80 km/h, the pub at the end of the southern loop that actually has secure covered parking.
A Touring 2 multi-week route with full waypoints, equipment requirements, and real notes from someone who's actually ridden it is a document worth sharing. This database is how you build that.