Imported runs, in full

A run that came from Strava used to be the poor relation of one you logged here by hand. That is no longer true, and two other things changed alongside it.

An imported run is just a run

Until this week, a Strava import landed without kilometre splits, without an age grade, and with no idea whether it was a race or a Tuesday. A GPX upload got all three. Same run, worse page, for no reason a runner would recognise.

Splits now come from Strava's own measurements — the distance and time of each kilometre as Strava recorded them — rather than being recomputed from a track that an import does not carry. They are fetched the first time you open one of your runs, once, and kept. Strava allows a limited number of requests in a quarter of an hour, so asking for the detail of two thousand past activities at connect time would spend the whole budget on runs nobody is looking at; asking when you open one spends it on the run in front of you. Open an older import and you may see a brief note where the table will be.

The age grade is now worked out the same way from every direction — the form, a GPX upload, an import — at your age on the day of the run — and only when your profile carries what it needs: your date of birth, your sex, and your consent.

And Strava says whether an activity was a race. The VO2max estimate reads that. Confidence used to be graded on duration alone, so a marathon read "low" however hard it was run; a race answers the question that the duration was only standing in for, so a race reads high confidence — unless your heart rate says the effort was not maximal, in which case the badge keeps its doubts.

A prediction from whatever you ran

A run had to land within 2% of a standard race distance to be offered a prediction. Miss that window — a 7.79 km loop, the kind of number a GPS watch actually produces — and the shortcuts under the run simply were not there.

Any run shorter than the marathon now offers them. The targets are the classic road ladder — 5K, 10K, half, marathon — and only the ones longer than what you ran, so a 7.79 km gets a 10K, a half and a marathon, and a 30 km long run finally gets its marathon. The run page never predicts downwards or from itself: a 30K already knows its 10K time. Follow a shortcut and the calculator carries your exact distance with it, no race name to hang it on. That came from calcpace v1.15, the open-source library behind the arithmetic here, which now reads a distance wherever it used to demand a race.

The age grade is deliberately not part of this. The tables that grade a performance publish a factor per specific distance, and 7.79 km has no standard to be graded against.

Connect Strava, where you would look for it

Connecting Strava was findable in exactly one place: the second tab of the settings page, behind a link that opens the first tab. Which is to say it was not findable.

Signed in and not yet connected, you now see the offer on the home page and on your dashboard, and a link to it in both menus. Once connected it all disappears — the settings card owns it from there, disconnecting included. Dismiss it instead and the banner and the menu links stay gone on that device; the settings card remains. And to be plain about what comes across: runs, trail runs and walks. Rides do not.