Using Strava as a diary to track your adventures is an overlooked and underappreciated element of the world’s most popular training app.
Strava has long enabled users to upload descriptions to the app. However, the addition of direct photo uploads in 2014, followed by video uploads in 2022, transformed Strava into a fully-fledged logbook.
I regularly revisit memorable rides on Strava, immortalised and enriched with a GPS trace, daft anecdotes and geo-tagged photos.
On cycle tours, I relish the post-dinner moments spent vegetating in my sleeping bag cocoon, dozily, digitally penning the day’s thoughts.
Working on BikeRadar, I’m blessed with a platform with which I can share such things to a larger audience, and my Strava diary formed the basis for my report on last year’s spring tandem tour – my favourite piece published on the site last year.
Longer rides closer to home are recalled months or years later with far greater clarity when I spend 30 mindful minutes writing stupid recollections as I fester in my chamois on the sofa.
Recalling fun adventures aside, the benefits journaling can bring to mental wellbeing and your memory are also well-documented.
I’m unlikely to keep a traditional diary (my handwriting is incomprehensible to start), but cycling is a core part of my life.
As such, these cycle tours and rides are the anchor points around which my year mentally revolves. Consciously documenting them has improved my recollection significantly.
The diarised approach to Strava is shared by at least a few of BikeRadar’s readers.
Commenting on Robin Weaver’s piece about why he doesn’t use Strava – it’s not for everyone, after all – BikeRadar reader jasperdog says he’s been on the app “since 2012, and the ability to look back over my rides around the world with pictures, stats (and now videos) is a great thing.”
“Good times recorded and saved in one place, unbeatable.”
Likewise, David Kalman writes with a nice anecdote about his snowboarding days: “When I was a kid, I used to collect lift tickets every time I went skiing or snowboarding growing up.
“At the end of the season, I used to count up all the lift tickets I accumulated throughout the season. I use Strava in the same way – I count the tickets (rides) and couldn’t care less about the data.”
A friend described my knee-jerk tendency to turn every conversation or observation about cycling into a story as a form of “content tourettes”. The unkind may also describe these posts as mere navel-gazing.
I’m unfettered, though – I have no illusions of becoming an admired diarist or tandem-riding, gravel-bashing Ernest Shackleton, but taking a more mindful approach has greatly enriched my time on an app that’s more than a data-log for mileage and power numbers.
I strongly encourage you to do the same. At the very least, you’re guaranteed to get more Kudos.
