Integrate races into Strava: race sign-ups, race events, race challenges, race feeds

[schaja]

It would be great if Strava offered the opportunity to sign-up for events/races within Strava and then others could see the upcoming events that they're training for. This would benefit Strava as well, as they would presumably get a cut of entries fees as the hosting platform.

[schaja]

It would be great if Strava had legitimate "team" pages and not just club pages. High schools, middle schools, and colleges all use Strava, so why not provide verified team pages so it could become an all-in-one resource for athletes to access training plans, schedules, and, of course, tracking activities? 

[Bryant]

 Hey @schaja,
Thank you for submitting you idea. It has been reviewed by our moderation team and is now open to voting.

[Edwin]

Either under statistics or as an extra section.

• Races
  Coming soon
  Completed

Also a search for athletes participating in a race would be useful.

[Yari]

I am sure a lot of people would want to connect with fellow athletes to chat as well as exchange advice, impressions and excitement online and in person at the event.

[Yari]

Also athletes will be able to see the popularity of the event, find people to travel with, exchange advice, ask questions, etc.

[NickRunBikeMN]

At the very least in someones profile page, a section for entering "last races" and "upcoming races or goals" etc

[villis]

I'm in Central America. It seems like most small races only use Facebook to advertise their races (I assume because of costs), so as a non-FB'er, I usually find out about races too late to train/sign up. It would be great if Stava could be a go-to place to link athletes with athletic events, no matter how small. Perhaps a tab where athletes can search races by type and distance, for example, and make it free for race directors to post their races. 

[Superbeek]

@schaja @villis @NickRunBikeMN @Yari @Edwin  lots of great ideas here. Further developing events on strava would be excellent.

Additional ideas:

1.) events could live within the “groups” tab. Combine the related “active” and “challenges” tabs so that it’s challenges/events/clubs up top. So many options here for discovering events: location, friends, trending etc. Could be a place to have major event news/recaps/features as well.

2.) partner integration with bikereg/runreg could be pretty cool. Would be really great if strava could scrape event data to populate events pages within strava.  

3.) when recording an activity type as “race” it would be cool if the race you’re signed up for would auto-populate and the user would have the option to tag their race as said race/event. Maybe there could be another option of tagging an activity as training for said event. Could help with event discovery and hype.

4.) This is a little more out there, but what the **bleep**… I know a lot of us use events as motivation so, somehow integrating an event into the progress tab could be interesting. Maybe strava could help a user determine the “fitness” number they’re hoping to achieve prior to a race. This fitness number could be broken down over time and live within “goals”. Also, races are plotted on the monthly fitness graph, what if these race goal points could be plotted out into the future. Would leverage stravas existing training tools to help users stay motivated, train safely and be prepared to do their best on race day.

[Rgny9955]

Why is Strava not THE industry standard for race finding and registration?!

Every runner I know has a Strava account.  What better way for race directors to connect with runners than an app and UI they’re all familiar with rather than these ad hoc and horrible race specific websites and aggregators??

Every runner I know spends hours trying to delve out details about prospective races on these horribly managed and unstructured websites.  What better way to find races than using your community (in app race rating and reviews?), standard sliders/filters, and most importantly:  last year’s actual GPS files from the specific race to help estimate actual distances, elevation, course markings (especially helpful for ultras)??  All of those annoying questions and boarding information items I have to enter for every race could be pre-filled from my Strava profile!

What better way for Strava to deepen its user engagement and revenue opportunities than taking a slice of registration fees and being THE place for RDs to send runners to register for their event?

A simple little “Races” tab at the bottom of the mobile app.

What am I missing?

[DL_44]

I think this is a great suggestion.

Subscriber Profile > List of upcoming and previous races > Races with hyperlink to race website and date > If completed, then show the applicable stats next to the event.

Subscriber feed > Shows when others have registered for a race (similar to challenges)

Training > Strava uses activity to help formulate race goal > Can indicate if user is on track 

Race > Has it's own filtered feed of who people who participated in it > Possibly allows subscriber to allow "flyby" feature for that activity only. 

[kaczmar4]

Would love to have a Strava race hub feature that could create a website based on a simple template for races, manage sign up and payments, and be used day of race day to track athletes, send updates, etc. Strava could monetize by charging race organizers 2-5% of the race admission fee + annual fee for using the platform. 

[sveta]

I support this suggestion. In the Balkans we have to aggregate events from different sources in a Google spreadsheet just to see them in one place, that's a bit annoying. I think every event organiser knows about Strava and would prefer to add info to Strava events

[MarkyBCus]

Yeah. Seems like a no-brainer opportunity to leverage the existing community, create additional revenue, and increase value of Strava, while not diminishing its core functionality. Count me in.

I found this post wanting to set some race goals in my profile. I would have sworn I could do this in the past. I recall being able to search for races and then mark them as attending. But I don't see any race searching features anymore. I remember being able to see past race results, details on the races, website links, course previews, etc. Am I confused?

At the least I'd like to see what @NickRunBikeMN suggested,

...a section for entering "last races" and "upcoming races or goals" etc.

---

Off the tope of my head, I see a Strava world where:

• Explore - you can search races on Strava. Find your next challenge by date, location, distance, event type, trail, road, etc. If they don't exist in the search results, you can add them manually. If you are the official race organizer, you can take ownership and aggregate listings, add official race page links, course maps, etc. Love the term "Race Hub" that @kaczmar4 used. I would have totally used this feature when I was recently setting my race goals for 2024. I basically just Googled the events I was interested in, and then followed my nose. But it would have been sweet if I could have done that here!
• Signup - Offer a signup link for the race, which could be monetized. Keep it sticky! Get some extra revenue. Partner with UltraSignup or the like.
• Attending - If, as an athlete, you marked a race as attending, Strava would add that race to your profile,  calendar and retain it in a race history. Strava might give you little notification pushes as you train, leading up to your race, and then check back in with you to see how you did, linking the activity you uploaded for that day to the race. 
• Community - Have a feed for a particular race as an option. Allow individuals to ask questions officially, or of other participants, post updates, coupon codes, promos, etc. Similar to what @Yari and @Superbeek suggested.
• Data - Leverage the data for already existing Premium features, like @Superbeek was saying.

I mean, everyone is making great suggestions here. Thanks for starting the thread @schaja! What's the latest on this @Jane? It's like not allowing Gifting subscriptions anymore... Is Strava allergic to creating more value coupled with new revenue streams? Sure, there would likely have to be staffing to help manage all that is being suggesting here, but wouldn't the potential income justify that?

Maybe Strava has already crunched the numbers and determined it wouldn't be worth the effort at this time, but it seems like a great investment.

[Silentvoyager]

I am pretty sure race search existed on Strava before, but the list of races was curated and fairly limited. 

[FelixSchmidt]

I have been on a training camp and met new people that share the same passion for Triathlon as I do. We were trying to compare our race schedules to see whether we were racing the same races or could support each other as spectators. 

I was wondering whether it makes sense for people to log their planned race starts and for them to see who else (of their connections) will be racing the same event. In a more advanced solution, it could also be helpful to see, who has raised this event in previous years to be able to reach out for questions. 

I think this adds a lot of value to the "clubhouse" purpose of the app.