Strava Hang Time Into the New Year

Excerpt from the full article published on Freetrail.com.

If you’re not obsessive over your training numbers, you’re either a recovered obsessor or you haven’t spent three paychecks on a sports watch yet.

Personally, I solved the classic 9.95-mile, run past my house to get a round number, fixation by splitting unit custody between my watch (imperial) and Strava (metric). Clean numbers on one device are a jumble on the other. This spun out my brain and it decided it no longer gave a shit. My legs, seeing exactly zero productive adaptation from +0.05 miles, co-signed dropping the absurdity.

What I still scale my entire human worth on, however, is miles per week and, by extension, miles per year. I understand if you’re a real trail runner your primary metric is likely vertical gain, but if you’re a real trail runner, you don’t live in coastal New Jersey.

You may have read about my urban ultras, a last ditch effort to maintain some semblance of adventure amid an otherwise unremarkable human experience by running routes better traversed by Greyhound buses. An edge case of this effort, a subset annual tradition of mine, draws on a fun, arbitrary choice made by some executive at Strava and implemented by some programmer with a line of code: the timestamp of an activity is pinned to its beginning, the moment you start your watch. (An activity’s end or middle point would also be perfectly acceptable conventions to define a single instance timestamp).

This means a run of any duration, let’s say 10 hours, starting at 11:59 p.m. on December 31st, 2022 will be 10 hours of hang time running into 2023 that still gets counted, in Strava, towards 2022. The very last chance to touch up that year-end mileage sum.

Read the rest of the aticle on Freetrail.com, and come back here to leave a comment :)

Sam Herreid
Sam Herreid
glaciologist, runner, musician, writer, barista

My research interests include rock debris on glaciers, advancing regional to global scale glacier modeling and restructuring the financing of climate science.