Forget Hinge or Tinder – Strava is the best dating app out there

But the app is in danger of being bogged down by a string of useless features, writes Andrew Georgeson. How are we supposed to peek in on our fellow runners’ relationships now?

Falling in love as runners, or hooking up with other ones, isn’t that uncommon (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Strava used to be the most complete social media app. It was inspirational. It was educational. You got joy out of seeing your friends do well and much-needed validation for yourself.

Its beauty comes in its simplicity: essentially it makes you feel like an elite athlete, giving you information about metrics you don’t fully understand when you are in fact just doing a profoundly hungover park run.

But it also provides hours of free entertainment as above anything else it gives you a free hit at being petty and political.

Very rarely does your perpetually late friend track their walk over, showing that they lied about the time they set off, but on Strava that’s exactly what they are doing. You get to see the lipstick on their collar. The smoking gun falls into your lap.

You lie in bed wondering aloud what their definition of easy is after they labelled their 5am run as such, and how their heart rate clearly doesn’t agree, despite the fact it’s 10am and you’re pretending to work from home and are still wearing pyjamas.

Before you know it, you’ve fallen into the trap of checking “elapsed time”, and noticing it is 10 minutes slower than the suspiciously fast 5k they posted.

But Strava is useful for something else too. Essentially, falling in love as runners, or hooking up with other ones, isn’t that uncommon. You’re spending upwards of three hours with these people at a time, or training by yourself every day, as your conversation and priorities regress from being the normal concerns of someone worryingly close to 30, to that of a child on a summer camp, thinking of your upcoming marathon and nothing else. You run out of things to say that are even vaguely relatable to say to anyone who hasn’t drank the Kool-Aid.

And because most runners of a certain level just, well, run, quite often the only way of finding out what is actually going on in their life is on Strava, as really all their social plans revolve around it.

And blossoming relationships follow the same path every time. There’s a group run. Maybe they meet at their club. All normal stuff so far. Then there is a tagged run together, prompting a collective scratch of the heads when you realise “wow, they must have got a bus to run with each other”. In-jokes in the comment sections of each other’s runs. Early morning starts outside of each other’s houses. Then a picture post. Then a full-blown soft-launch on Instagram, with a Strava bar chart overlay.

Runners show their love by the faster one pacing the slower one for a session on a Thursday morning, before posting a picture in a Battersea coffee shop with a £9 almond croissant afterwards. “Proud of this one”, the caption reads, from the faster half of the couple (before adding it is nice to get some “easy miles” in – you have to always get the flex in there).

You get the chance to see an entire relationship arc play out in real time, kilometre by kilometre, until a “catch up run with the gals” post drops and you realise that it’s all over.

Until very recently, the flirting had to be done in public. Everyone who has interacted with the post can see every response, every comment, and everyone gets a push notification. Phone camera rolls are littered with screenshots, as side-eye emojis are thrown about.

And now Strava has changed all that with the addition of a direct message feature. In one fell swoop the app has taken away this entire psychodrama, and hours of content. Running is a sport of marginal gains, of putting your hand in the fire, commitment and prioritising, and it almost feels counter-intuitive that people can shoot their shot behind closed doors. How many people are going to use this feature to swap shoe advice, or arrange to meet up with their mates when something like WhatsApp has a pin feature?

And there’s the more serious side too. Strava is relatively bot-free and advert-free at the minute. And even though you do need to accept private messages from people, there are already plenty of concerns for female runners. Nobody wants the unwanted attention they often receive on the streets heading into their direct messages. The option to hide your start and finish location doesn’t hugely solve that problem, as you can still see 95 per cent of the route. Just because you think you know someone from a running club doesn’t inherently make them safe.

Ultimately, it feels like Strava is folding to pressure; trying to find ways to pile features into an app that doesn’t really need them. It’s disheartening to see things I used to love slowly creeping behind a paywall, as the developers forget what people are actually there for.