If you forget to record your run on Strava, did it even happen? The much-loved app is a crucial part of our toolbox, and it’s about to get even better. We have a run-through of the new features, and give kudos where it’s due

Words: Tina Chantrey

If you’ve been a runner for more than 10 years, it’s likely you used to save basic information about your training runs in an old exercise book with curly edges. That’s if you had the time, could find it and could be bothered. Sometimes you may have added what the weather was like, and a thumbs up or down depending on how the run went. In reality, after a run, most of us forgot to record what we did in that book. Or thought, ‘I’ll do it later…’ and never did.

Then came Strava in 2009, a multilayered app that recorded everything you needed to know about every run, cycle or strength session. Stats were available as soon as you finished your workout, from heart rate zones, cadence, splits, a map of your route, elevation… suddenly runners had so much information in their pockets. How did we ever work out how far we had run before Strava came along? This special running community grew rapidly, and now has 57 million athletes connected around the world, with three billion activity uploads. Unfathomable.

Running is booming this year in ways we couldn’t have imagined even as recently as Christmas. At about the same time as thousands of people started to adapt their lifestyles and sprinkle in the odd run or two per week, Strava introduced some smart new features to make that training more fun, and your stats even more accessible.

So what’s new on this much-loved app, and how will recent upgrades impact and improve your training?

Fancy a new route?

“One of our exciting new features is called Routes, where we suggest three routes based on certain criteria that you select,” explains Simon Klima, director of global marketing and head of UK Strava. “Criteria are how far you want to go, the surface you want to train on, such as off-road or paths, and how much elevation you’re looking for.”

Strava takes your default location and looks for a new route for you. However, the real beauty of this lies in the fact that you can manually put in a location, for example, a hotel you are staying at on holiday, and Strava will sort you out. “The app looks at all the routes available (remember there are three billion on Strava) and finds one just for you,” says Simon. “We feel this works well for regular users at the moment, as many of us have been running from the same place and doing the same route due to lockdown restrictions.”