Your Strava Pace Is Incorrect

Great Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash

I track, you track, seemingly everybody tracks.

Whether you use Garmin, Strava, Nike Run Club or your device’s tracking app, every runner I know relies on tech to measure their miles and pace.

But what if these apps are wrong?

I noticed that Strava was consistently tracking my runs faster than normal awhile ago.

Since I hadn’t been working on speed at all, I found that suspicious.

So I dug into the app itself.

The first “feature” I discovered is that Strava automatically updates the time and average pace based on how I labeled the run.

If you label a run anything other than a race (None, Workout or Long Run) the app shows a “moving time.”

Based on what I read in support forums, “moving time” eliminates any time spent moving in a way that the Strava algorithm decides is too slow.

Strava explains that runners can get a more accurate pace by consistently manually pausing the app while mid-run — like at traffic lights — but I generally find this to be a pain in the ass.

The other option is to not pause at all, which “uses your device’s accelerometer to detect running motion” so it’s unclear whether this pacing would include walk breaks or not.

Based on my past experience and current data, I’m guessing it wouldn’t.

So I experimented.

I went on the exact same run using Strava, Nike Run Club and the workout app on my Apple Watch.

Both Apple and Nike thought I ran 4.9 miles. More specifically, Apple tracked me at 4.92 and Nike at 4.96 — the difference of about half a city block. That’s no big deal, but Strava thought I ran 5.11 — nearly 0.2 miles further.

Which explains why I always hear my mile splits about 0.2 miles before the mile markers at races.

As I expected, there were differences in my average pace and splits, too.

Strava tracked me the fastest, at an average of 10:55 per mile in “moving time.”