Why am I using Strava?

I’ve been wrestling with whether to keep Strava around. A few months back, I cancelled my subscription because the premium features weren’t doing much for me anymore. The detailed analytics and training plans looked impressive, but I found myself barely glancing at them. These days, I’m really just using the free version to scroll through what my friends are doing—catching up on their weekend long runs or seeing who’s finished a big race.

Here’s where I get stuck: that connection with friends actually does matter to me. There’s something genuinely motivating about seeing someone crush a hilly route or finally hit a personal best they’ve been chasing. It’s a different kind of social network, one that feels less angry than most. But I’ve been trying to pare down the number of apps and platforms I’m juggling. Each one demands a little piece of my attention, a login to remember, another feed to check. It adds up to a kind of low-grade mental clutter.

So I’m left weighing this pretty straightforward trade-off: the value of staying connected to a community of people I actually care about versus my desire to simplify and reduce the digital noise in my life. Part of me thinks I should just reach out to these friends directly, maybe text them about their workouts or plan to run together. But I know myself well enough to admit that probably won’t happen with the same regularity. Strava makes it effortless, almost ambient. The question is whether that ease is worth keeping one more app in the rotation, or if this is exactly the kind of passive engagement I should be trying to eliminate.

Another, small, consideration is that Strava also ended up being an aggregator of my data across apps and devices. So, I have records of my workouts all the way back to 2013 in there. Realistically, though, my running paces from a decade ago are irrelevant to today and, mostly, just a sad reminder of when I was faster.

Strava isn’t helping themselves with their overly aggressive attempts to get me to sign back up for a subscription either. The pestering is annoying.

For now, I’ve set the default workout visibility to “hidden”, so no one else can see them. I’ll keep the app in the background, importing current workouts, and see how I feel after ignoring it for a month. One less reason to be looking at my phone has to be good.