Add more support for multi-sport activities

[dsm1891]

Hey,

Strava has always traditionally been focused on Cyclists, but more and more features are coming out for additional sports. I would like Strava to better support Multi sport, in both activities and athletes stats/data.

I would love to see is being able to unify/upload multiple activities that were related to each other e.g. a Triathlon. The user experience is always quite clunky, and its hard to view as a single effort/activity when looking at past activities.

Ideally this would be a single activity with different sections per sport and includes transition period. 

This would greatly improve the experience to both the user and their followers. For example the user will be able to differentiate between a 10k run and a 10k run they did at the end of a triathlon. It gives much more context into the athletes effort and doesn't treat single sport activities the same as multi sport

It will benefit their followers as it will reduce the amount of activities displayed on the feed (e.g. if they do lots of swim/run/swim/run/swim/run training). 

Look forward to hearing from you

[RolandK]

Although I see a lot of posts about multisport, I still want to pitch my idea.

When doing triathlon you have areas where you do swimming, running, cycling and transition. These area's are marked and tracked so that after your race you can see how much time you spent in each area. Why couldn't that be done with a gpx file your recorded during your entire race? You need to be able to split up the gpx file (graphically on a map) into area's and assign the right sport to it (transition being also a sport element). That would mean you don't have to fiddle with your watch and remember to switch, you just record your effort in one gpx and divide it afterwards. If running and cycling is close to each other it might be hard to distinguish but with the help of a transition area and time, I don't think that the algorithm to split things up would not be rocket science.

Ones this is evolved I foresee that you create area's before your start the race and you can upload these area's as race data so that all athletes can use it to split up their one record gpx. 

- Easy to create using only start and stop when recording. Concentrate on your sport not on your watch

- Creating area's should be easy using map visuals and easy to share

- useable for several multisport activities (triatlon, run-bike-run, ...)

[lopey66]

@RolandK gpx files are very basic GPS files, tcx is the more advanced XML language file that allows you to store other data such as heartrate, cadence, power. Fit files is main storage for bike devices and now watches, there are already tools out there to split and crop. Your watch could do everything as it can detect you swimming, running and riding, I am happy to press lap button on my watch to split the activity into each sport

[mike]

Not sure why this hasn't been implemented yet. The .fit file that comes off a Garmin device when you record any multisport activity already has everything nice and neatly organized (i.e., it's one file with all of the sports in it, in order). Seems like it's mostly a user interface exercise to implement it.

[candorphine]

I totally agree that adding multi-sport activity functionality would vastly improve user experience. One obvious application would be for people participating in triathlon or adventure racing. It would be ideal to let the user determine boundaries for the different sections (e.g., swim/bike/run, or kayak/bike/trek/bike) at the end of the recording because you can't pull your phone to switch activities in Strava during the race. I understand some recording devices already record the transition info and could then send it to Strava, but there should also be a feature to do this a posteriori for those who solely rely on Strava to record. Thanks!

[Ronald]

@mike yes it is mostly a user interface exercise. But Strava does not consider triathlon or multisport activities as something important, clearly not a priority after so many years. It sounds more important to develop the "Tips for building community" than answer to the several millions of triathletes in the world. I can't catch the point but is my point of view important ?

[lopey66]

@candorphine definitions of activity type start at the user end such as a watch, in my case a triathlon I have the watch setup to do swim,T1 ,Cycle ,T2 & Run all one event with each leg as activity and this done automatically when I press the lap button, further I can define them, during a race you cannot carry a phone(outside assistance rule), everything is upload automatically from my watch without me having to intervene. This topic is about people requesting a group of activities summarised together

[Jane]

Hi @Ronald 

Just a quick update on this;  We recently noticed that the suggestion you submitted about adding triathlon activity types to Strava is a duplicate of another suggestion on our Ideas Board.

I've merged your suggestion with that one.  This makes sure suggestions are easy to find,  and that votes for them aren’t divided across duplicate ideas.

[MadleenH23]

I really would encourage you to show that in a combined way. 
I’m a triathlet and uploading as well as judging others stats is tricky as it doesn’t give full visibility. As a triathlete you have 3 different sport activities, but no triathlon race time. Unless the user is uploading as a picture. That would enhance the user experience for both uploaded and kudos giver and do justice for what many people do, more than one sport activity 

[Keeks]

@Jane Is there any movement on this topic......have the developers even looked at this. It it s topic that has been around since Strava Started and doesn't seem to be moving at all. 

Its gather kudos for a while now......it would be nice to see some movement here

[lopey66]

@Keeks & @MadleenH23 this is my own stats from last friday when I did a bike & run, I have 2 pages as one is a summary of each activity type(sport) & the second is a multisport summary, I have defined multisport as more than 1 sport in a day. I have rerun the page for the year also, just so you can see the summary for the year, this is a variation again as multisport summary, I have previously posted on how strava can tag multisport activities(race ?) and have a summary of them (header) followed by each activity

[stubaii]

This would be a fantastic feature and surprised it’s not already done. Activities could all still be separate as they are now to reduce the development impact but have the ability to join related activities into a single overall view with combined distance, time and elevation summaries for showing in feeds and activity lists. Open the combined view and see the individual activities as normal.

[lopey66]

@stubaii strava has the weekly training log(subscriptions) and you can get summaries for the week based on dropdowns which you can change on the go, with bubbles of each activity which you can mouse hover to get the stats or click to view the actual activity.  The combined open view is major change the way I see it, a simple summary inserted like a new activity followed by all the activities associated,that is more for followers so that they don't see other people activities in between your group of activities, that group could be changing as some maybe uploading activities on the go and that is a positive as friends love to see updates if your doing a race or a challenge.

if you want to try my web based app page https://lopeys.com/strava/period_activities_stats.php just go through authorizing access, the output is 2 images

[jleeuwer81]

I would also really really like this feature.

My reason for this would be:

• running to the track (run activity)
• running on the track (track run)
• running home (run activity)

Garmin allows me to do this very neatly, but then it will still end up in Strava as 3 separate activities. Which is quite ugly.

[Keeks]

@Jane Again a request for an update from Stava on this Topic......is there a plan to look at this?

[Johan6504]

From the swimrun community, this has been asked a lot of times. Swimrun Monaco even made a name collection to try to persuade strava/garmin to make this happen. But nothing happens, all people I have talked to have pretty much given up on this. Swimruns gets logged as runs which doesn't make any sense what so ever 👎