Kudos

"Give Kudos"

If it isn’t on Strava, did it happen?

Running apps that sync to your watch or phone to track runs have been around for a long time.  It is a great way to track your progress, review routes, and dive into stats.  Some apps have added a social component, allowing you to interact with runners you follow or who follow you.  If you’ve been running for a little while, chances are you have a Strava account.  If you’re new to running and asking yourself “do I need Strava?” allow me to talk about the pros and cons of apps like Strava.

Strava origin

Starting out in 2009, Strava was first an app for cycling and running.  Other sports were added later, intending to replicate the camaraderie and competition the founders felt was missing after leaving college.

By the peak of the pandemic running boom, millions upon millions of users and updates per day, Strave established itself as the go to app for tracking fitness activity. 

How it works

Activities are loaded into the app, and the app provides analytics that measures effort, distance, time vs. previous attempts, and other metrics. 

Users can connect with each other and leave comments and kudos (likes) on other athletes’ efforts.

Pros

The interactive aspect of Strava is great.  Strava segments offer up a form of competition against your friends and the Strava-verse to achieve the fastest time (course record)  or most occurrences of completing the segment, which will crown you a local legend. 

Strava provides the ability to create routes (in the premium version) and you are able to view popular routes near your location, which is very handy when travelling.

The premium version also provides access to training plans, gear tracking, and logging activities, tracking performance versus previous attempts.

In terms of safety, Strava allows for keeping your runs private (only you can see the activity) and hiding your start and finish points, as well as allowing who can follow you, and who can see your activities. 

Cons

The most popular con amongst runners is the “Strava tax” where the app, for whatever reason might shave off 0.01 km and leave a run not as a nice whole number, which drives runners crazy.

Another con is GPS accuracy. Sometimes runs are faster, or slower, or don’t cover the proper distance (you’ll see this in races all the time).  There's another con worth talking about a little more than the others: the peer pressure that Strava creates.   Seeing your friends complete and load activities is great for a little motivational push, and we all know we’ll need that from time to time.  But it can be a little negative in a way.  Sometimes you’ll see friends and other people you follow with faster runs, faster races, able to cover more distance, and this can have a negative impact and motivate negatively.  Runners may be influenced by activities in their feed, or even their stats, and decide to push too much to stroke their ego. This can often end up with injuries and burnout.

Do you need Strava?  Well, there are many apps out there that track activities including those that come with many GPS watches, but Strava is in a class of its own when it comes to incorporating community.  We went through some of the pros and cons of Strava, and the value of an app like Strava will garner a different response from everyone you talk to.  There is no right or wrong answer to what app is best to track your activities, as long as you don’t let the numbers own you. 

WORKOUT OF THE WEEK

3-2-1-2-3-2-1 ladder

This tempo workout gives you time at different paces. Start out with a half marathon pace effort for 3 mins, 10k effort for 2 mins, and 5k for 1 min, and same effort as you go back to 2 mins, 3 mins and back down again. You can either take a standing rest for a min between efforts or a jogging recovery.