fitness

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.

🔗 When the Watch Makes the Call - Steve Magness

We’re all entering an era where we get to decide what level of automation we want for just about anything. Do we want the free flowing unmediated experience of just running and feeling it all. Do we want feedback, agency, or even at the extreme, the work done for us? It’s all possible now, unlike at any point in history.

Second only to note-taking apps, my phone is full of fitness trackers. Magness makes the important point that we have a choice to make about our own agency in fitness.

I’m deciding to not take this any further than using these analytical outputs for seeing the broad rhythms of my training. My main motivation for even doing these things is to be active and healthy. In part, this surely has to be staying aware of my perceived fitness and capacity for training. My watch can provide some perspective, but I won’t cede control to it.

(via The Morning Shakeout)

🏃‍♂️ Approaching the time of day when, having run into work this morning, I debate if I should just take the train back. The return run seemed like a much better idea this morning

🏊‍♂️🚴🏃‍♂️ The Guelph Lake Olympic Triathlon was great fun, though challenging. Big thanks to my daughter for her expert race crewing.

A map displays the route of the Guelph Lake Olympic Triathlon covering 46.43 km in 2 hours and 44 minutes with 2,581 kcal burned, passing through locations like Armstrong Mills and Speedsid, along with the date Sat, Jun 20.A smiling man wearing a black triathlon t-shirt, a finisher medal around his neck, and a cap stands outdoors on a grassy field with cars and trees in the background under a partly cloudy sky.A young woman wearing a green sweatshirt, navy pants, and a cap is standing on a grassy area with several parked cars and trees in the background.

RunnerCast is a great, single purpose app that tells me one thing: how is the weather for my run?

Two smartphone screens display weather forecast details for Toronto, including temperature, wind, and precipitation information for current and upcoming days. Taken from my recent use of RunnerCast

Prior to RunnerCast, I’d open up the Weather app on my phone and squint at various metrics. Now, I’m presented with a straightforward set of colours on a timeline and declarative sentence about if I should go now. I also appreciate that I can tweak my tolerance for temperature, precipitation, and other weather features to match my preferences.

Another helpful feature is that you can add in upcoming events (like the half marathon shown in the screenshot) to start preparing mentally for whatever is coming up on race day.

I’m fond of apps like these: well designed, specific, and useful.

Heart rate distribution in HealthFit ❤️

I like the new heart rate distribution graphs in HealthFit.

Here’s an example from a recent intervals run that shows decent recovery back to Zone 2 in between each hard effort. This helps me make sure I’m neither pushing too hard nor slacking in those intervals.

A frequency distribution graph illustrates heart rate variability across five zones (Z1 to Z5) ranging from 115 to 163 bpm, featuring distinct blue, green, yellow, and red peaks.

There’s a different profile for a recent HIT session that kept me in a pretty steady high effort once the warmup was done.

A heart rate frequency graph shows zones Z1 to Z5 with corresponding colors and a range from 116 to 152 bpm.

The overall distributions by activity type are fun. Although no one is surprised to see that yoga is less intensive than running or cycling.

A multicolored line graph displays heart rate distributions across different activities such as running, cycling, functional strength training, walking, and yoga.

HealthFit remains my app of choice for integrating all of my fitness data.