If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen. And while it’s obviously a joke, it goes to show how much this app has taken over our athletic lives.
You’ll almost certainly be using Strava. It’s one of the most popular fitness apps with more than 50 million registered athletes from 195 countries.
It’s become a phenomenal motivational tool. We’ve all felt that added urge to push when we know we’ve on a running segment. There are hundreds of olympic champions, but only one segment leader from bus stop to lamppost on the B1057.
For mere mortals, this has become our Olympic Games, our social network and the way we measure ourselves against running friends. Beyond that, it’s also an incredibly valuable training tool – if you know what to do with the information.
However, Strava’s recent decision to put many of its most popular features behind a paywall has thrown a spanner in the works.
But, worry not, the free version still has a lot of great value – especially if combined with one of the best kept secrets in the sports app world; Elevate.
This Chrome plug-in syncs with your Strava account and analyses your activities to give you lots of additional information.
It’s real strength is giving you a visual overview of all your activities – plotting a graph to show your activities, intensity, fatigue and fitness.
The app works best when your activities hold heart rate data. This information is fed into the algorithm to indicate the effectiveness of training sessions on overall fitness and your ability to recover.
As well as having a user-friendly interface to show heart rate, distance, elevation and speed, it shows you your trend – compares matched activities and tells you if you’re getting faster. Use this feature to show how effective your training has been.
It is also a handy log for all your activities. This gives you a total milage at the end of each month or year.
Knowledge is power. So now you have a new way of looking at your training programme – and seeing what’s working and what’s not.
