Ep42 Transcript: How to Use the Strava App to Help Your Running – Quick Fix Friday

Andrea Vahl: Do you want a little motivation, accountability, and tracking for your running habit, but aren’t sure where to turn? I definitely recommend the Strava app. In episode 40, I talked to my friend Jeff Korhan, who talked about how to run a marathon in your sixties and whatever time in midlife, and he uses Strava and I think it’s a great app. We’re gonna dive in this episode of Quick Fix Friday.

Intro: Hello dreamers. Welcome to the Late Starters Club, giving you the inspiration mindset and tools you need to start something midlife and beyond. Remember, it’s never too late to follow your dreams.

So the Strava app has a lot of great features. You can do things like track your activities and not just running all different types of activities, but you can also look for maps and routes near you, and you can find groups and communities to talk about different issues. And you can goal set and get some challenges in there as well.

So it’s a cool app and what I like about it is you can follow people and get connected to people and log your runs and you can see what kinds of things they’re doing. It’ll log things like your mileage, your elevation gain, your pace, your splits, all that type of things that you get in a normal app, but it has a social component too, where you’re following friends, getting connected to people. In the app I’ve got some friends that I’m following and I can see what kinds of activities they’re doing and you can comment on their activities as well. And ask them how it went, get more information about maybe their route.

And one thing I really like is the maps component. So the maps component allows you to find runs near you and you can see exactly how long they are, what kind of elevation gain they might have, which is really important here out in Colorado. Cuz I’m looking for more flat but occasionally I will seek out some elevation gain if I’m training for a race in the mountains.

Another cool section is the groups area. The groups area has groups that you can join, but it also has things like challenges. So for example, they’ve got a January half marathon challenge, so you can decide that you want to join that or start getting a little more accountability for whatever type of challenge you wanna do. There’s local clubs that you can find in there and you can find some different available challenges based on different types of activities there.

And it’s got some great search features as well in case you don’t see anything immediately on that challenges home screen. And if you don’t find the right challenge, you can create a challenge and have other people join you. And if you’re trying to remain accountable, definitely do something like post your goals and record those and have your friends help cheer you on for those particular goals.

Another group I wanted to draw attention to because I am super slow.

Oh, I’m slow

I’m not a fast runner, but I do enjoy it. I find it very meditative and I love the challenge of race day and getting out there and just moving my body. So I wanted to give you a great resource that I just heard about. It is the Slow AF Run Club, and you can find that at Slowafrunclub.com. It’s a community of 25,000 people who are all so slow and you can get a lot of support in that group. It’s free to join, but they do have a premium option if you want some help from coaches and extra coaching along the way.

Strava does have a free option, but I really recommend the premium option to get all the features. They have a free 30-day trial and then it’s just $6.67 cents a month. Such a deal.

Outro: Hope that was helpful, and make sure you grab the free guide. Top Tools for late starters on the website at latestartersclub.com and let’s turn dreaming into doing.