2 ACCEPTED SOLUTIONS
Hi @Silentvoyager,
We know this has been a long-time quirk, and often a frustration for many athletes, including some of our own employees! The reason this happens is that Garmin (both the device and Garmin Connect) rounds up distances, whereas Strava rounds down. Distances are always stored in meters on devices and then shown on Strava in the athlete's preferred units (i.e. miles/yards for imperial and kilometers/meters for metric). So for example, a distance that comes over in a file as 4995 meters will get displayed on Strava as 4.99 km and on Garmin as 5.00 km. Similarly, if on your watch you run until you see 1.00 miles, that might actually be something like 1608.0 meters (0.9994 miles) and Strava will show 0.99 miles.
It is also worth clarifying that most Garmins, even relatively older ones, provide a distance directly in the file that Strava uses. There are cases we calculate distance ourselves from the raw GPS points; for example, if a certain device doesn't provide it. And athletes can also choose to use our calculated distance to override the device one - see How Distance is Calculated for more.
One other nuance for the question from @MattS_bsb regarding race distances like a half marathon or marathon. There are features like Best Efforts and Challenges based on those Best Efforts that require athletes to complete a certain distance. One thing we have seen is athletes who run 26.2 miles and not receiving credit. This stems from the same issue above - that a marathon is 26.22 miles when converted from its official distance (26 miles and 385 yards), and athletes are often slightly short.
We understand that this is a bit of a philosophical stance we've taken - the digital version of "running all the way to the line". There is a tradeoff here between the consistency with Garmin and satisfaction of the round numbers (because yes, we've all been there), and the care we aspire to take with data correctness and integrity. This is one of an exceedingly long list of nuances around data as we pursue making Strava work for thousands of devices, each with its recording subtleties and differences.
Hopefully that helps clear things up and explains why you might see some crafty athletes running til they see 1.01 on the watch. We will strive to continue using this forum as a place to transparently explain more of these types of situations to athletes.
@MattS_bsb if you can file a Support ticket with your C2 rowing files, we can take a look into what is going on there, as it is likely (as you and others in the linked post noted) different than the "rounding" issue here.
