With Garmin and other watches, there are ‘track run’ modes that calculate the distance of an activity based on the number of laps of an athletics track, rather than directly from the GNSS trace. This results with an activity distance that precisely relates to the distance of the effort. However, when that activity is uploaded to Strava, I’ve found that Strava’s own distance-calculating algorithms are applied and the distance comes up short (eg: 5000 m track run came out as 4999 m) This is problematic as the ‘true’ distance is likely to be a ‘best effort’ distance, so losing any amount may result in a new best effort performance being overlooked (fortunately not the case in my example).
My suggestion: if the uploaded activity is a track run, do not apply smoothing distance algorithms and retain the original distance value.
Hi
In some situations you can change the distance that is shown for your activity. Changing the distance stream may also update the pace or duration of an activity. If your device created a distance stream using sensors such as a speed sensor, pedometer, or accelerometer, you can switch your distance on Strava to use GPS data rather than the generated distance stream.
To swap your distance stream:
- Go to your activity page on the website (this feature is currently not accessible in our mobile apps)
- From the activity page click on (◦◦◦) the more options menu > Correct Distance.
- From the pop-up, click "Correct Distance".
- When the status changes from "Calculating" to "Updated," refresh the page.
If you would like to revert the change, you can click the same link and click "Revert Distance".
For more information, see our article on How distance is calculated for your activity.
Cool, that fixed the distance on the activity that prompted this Idea. Hopefully Track Runs are automatically fixed in future.
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