What am I missing by not having Strava?

It sounds like you don't care about the social aspect, OP, which is your choice. Strava provides an easy way to track training, keep up with friends (friends that maybe don't live in the same place as you), and seeing how people are training -- including pros.

I've got running friends all over the place. It's fun to see them still ticking off miles and to comment back and forth every once and a while. Tons of pros are also on Strava and post all of their training. That can be fun to follow too.

I'm old school and still maintain a daily training log where I write down, how far, how long, how I felt and other things. Having said that, I have a Garmin, which I love and recently I joined Strava. It's ok, I follow a few people, I vacillate between not needing to share my runs, to wanting to and seeing what others are doing. I can see where a female would worry about being stalked, that may sound sexist, but I have two daughters, I would caution them about posting where and when they are running. With regard to my Garmin, I love that I can keep up with my pacing and distance, something I've always been obsessed with even before the technology came out. I like being able to see the data on Strava, even without any social aspects, but I don't need it.

I know this thread was started a year ago but whatever.

The thing I’ve liked most about strava is creeping on people’s logs who have either steadily improved through the past few years, or had a big breakthrough. I creep the heck out of their logs and look for patterns and stuff (while knowing that the same stuff isn’t guaranteed to work for me).

But it’s nice to see that, hey, this is a 2:18 marathon guy who had similar PRs to me in college, and this is what he’s done to get here. I usually just find that most guys I see thriving are doing tons of 10k-MP work, with a very small amount of speed, and most importantly, are consistent as hell.

Strava for me is an automatic running log. I can see weekly, monthly, yearly mileage etc. The killer feature that lots of people overlook is tracking shoe mileage. Tag which shoes you were wearing and it tracks the mileage for you.

Bullet the Blue Sky wrote:

Strava for me is an automatic running log. I can see weekly, monthly, yearly mileage etc. The killer feature that lots of people overlook is tracking shoe mileage. Tag which shoes you were wearing and it tracks the mileage for you.

You can do that on Garmin Connect as well.

Runner-9999 wrote:

[quote]SprintTriathlon wrote:

now the main feature I use, and which I find useful, is that it tracks your run and if you run it again you can compare the times and heartrate and such, and after awhile you have a lot of runs on the same course and you can go back to say april 2019 and see how you did the compared to now.

I have stacks of calendars with logged workouts that serves the same purpose. I also still have my trusty Timex Ironman.

I use strava for a few reasons:

Building rapport with people at my running club

Having an interactive logbook with pretty maps

Looking at other peoples routes for ideas

I think it was a mistake when strava automatically turned off flyby because it reduced the feeling of community especially in races. Yeah women might be worried about stalkers but they would be aware of the privacy settings.

I also joined strava in the hope that I would make new friends, but it hasn't really worked out. Strava is like all social media... it's not social at all and is only for show.

That's what we did in HS. Sometimes we drove roads and used our car odometer to guesstimate how long routes should be. And the odos were the manual ones that would roll with numbers (not digital). Was in HS from '98 to '02.