Strava

From IndieWeb

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Strava is an exercise tracking silo often used for running and bicycling that uses native mobile apps and syncs with exercise trackers such as smart watches; a few IndieWeb community members PESOS from Strava to their sites.

How to Export

You can export your Strava data either as individual activities or as a bulk export.

Bulk export

  1. Go to https://www.strava.com/ and login to your account
  2. Go to https://www.strava.com/settings/profile
  3. Scroll down and under the "Download your data" click the "Download" link or button
  4. Wait for your export to show up in your email

The bulk export consists of a .zip archive folder of one file per activity, named after the date-time YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS-EXERCISE.gpx where EXERCISE is a word like "Run". Each file contains only the name of the activity, e.g. "Morning Run", the start-time, and then a GPX trk of timestamped latlongele points of the exercise.

Not included:

  • Kudos (Strava like equivalent) on activities
  • Comments on activities
  • Photos added to activities

More details:

Activity Export

You can view your activities in a list here:

  • https://www.strava.com/athlete/training
  • From there, you can click on an individual activity permalink
  • Then add "/export_original" to the end of the URL and it will download a FIT file
    • if you add "/export_gpx" it will download a GPX

Not included:

  • Kudos (Strava like equivalent) on activities
  • Comments on activities
  • Photos added to activities

API

  • The Strava API offers access to detailed data, which also includes kudos/likes, segment results, etc.

Third party tools

  • You can use tapiriik (for free) to sync GPS files between a number of destinations, including a Dropbox folder.
    • This will not sync manually created activities.
  • Strava offers an API with a healthy ecosystem. Maybe other services offer export...?
  • On IWS 2017, Sebastian Kippe added Strava to Huginn, an open source IFTT alternative in Ruby. See his demo

Features

(this section is a stub and needs expansion!)

Strava is a specialized silo for tracking distance and speed of activities, so it offers a lot of different views on your data. Most features are visualizations of your runs/rides, one by one or overall averages.

In 2017-10, Strava started supporting 'posts', which are notes with optional photos, not accompanied by an activity. Blogpost about posts.

Overviews of activities: (need to be logged in to view)

Other features:

  • Routes - map with route to follow while running. Make your own private ones, share with friends, or use public routes.
  • Segments - parts of routes, with their own Leaderboards and Personal Records, with a lot of sub-sections on age, gender and weight class.
  • Shoe and bike tracking - you can keep track of how much miles / kilometers you ran on your shoes and rode on your bike. You can pick a bike / pair of shoes per ride / run, which will add the distance to the total distance on the bike / shoes.
  • ...

IndieWeb Examples

Sorted roughly by (semi-)automatic and regular examples first, occasional, experiments, and in-progress later

Jan Sauer

Jan Sauer has been publishing his latest Strava activities on his website https://jansauer.de since 2023-10-29 using Strava embeds, e.g.:

Tantek

Tantek Çelik has occasionally manually written PESOS-like posts for his races or notable PRs on Strava and linked back to the original Strava Activity since ~2017:

He’s also occasionally written posts that are primarily about a Strava activity but with very different prose so aren’t really a PESOS per se:

IndieWeb Work In Progress

Sebastian Kippe

At IndieWebSummit 2017, Sebastian Kippe got some code working to retrieve data from Strava.

Brainstorming

What IndieWeb Features

If we could submit feature requests to Strava, e.g. to make it more indieweb friendly, what would we specifically request?

  • ...

POSSE

There are several places and way where it would be great to be able to POSSE to Strava:

  • exercise posts - what Strava calls "activities" - you can upload a GPX file for an activity recorded elsewhere, and Strava has ways to OAuth in from other site (likes the Suunto site movescount.com) - so this should be possible from your own site as well, at a minimum by simulating a GPX import into Strava.
    • you can attach (a lot of) photos to a Strava activity and give each one a caption
  • like posts - you should be able to "like" an "activity" on Strava and POSSE it as a Strava "Kudos" on that activity.
  • reply posts - you should be able to POSSE a reply post to an "activity" with comment text.

support.strava.com - Strava's support site has some of the usual support forum POSSE opportunities

Bridgy Feature request:

tapiriik is a "sync" app that will synchronize activities between many exercise apps and could, potentially, serve as a POSSE app in place of Bridgy. The app is also open source so you could look at how they connect and translate from each of the connected sites.

backfeed

Similarly there are backfeed opportunities from Strava POSSE copies:

  • kudos - backfeed as a like
  • comments - backfeed as replies

and from support.strava.com

Bridgy Feature request:

Criticism

  • Sign-up requires birthday (year month and day)

Downtime

  • 2017-02-28 Strava’s iOS app was nearly completely broken likely due to that day's S3 outage:

Screenshots

Sessions

See Also

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