Continuing the theme of running, today’s post is about tracking my runs. There are a few big name running tracking sites out there, but in my running life I’ve mainly used two. The first one that I used consistently is Endomondo. It came on the recommendation of a friend and it served me really well for quite a few years. However, lately I’ve moved over to tracking with Strava.

Why the change, and what do I miss out on from Endomondo? First off, I find that the Strava UI is much cleaner and nicer to use. I feel like it’s much less cluttered and somewhat… pretty. It’s just an overall nicer user experience. Additionally, there are features on Strava that I like better. In particular the shoe tracking feature is a great way to keep track of how many miles you’ve put on your various footwear.

Strava also has different challenges than Endomondo. Every month Strava has a 10K and half-marathon challenge that earn you a badge, and sometimes even the ability to order specially colored challenge clothing. These, and other badges are a nice motivation for getting out there to get at least 13 miles done in a run once a month.

The one area where Strava falls down is in it’s statistic package. Strava has very good stats for each individual activity, but I miss the aggregate statistics capabilities of Endomondo. I’ve put in a few suggestions to help make things better, and hopefully Strava will adopt some of the ideas. Despite not having a terribly robust stats feature, I can still get super detailed statistics because Strava has an open API to their system. Another site that I use is veloviewer. It’s a site that syncs your Strava data and then gives you more statistical information than you could ever use. It’s not a pretty user interface, but it’s incredibly functional and full-featured.

That’s some quick thoughts on my tracking site of choice. Since I have friends who use both sites, I use the connection feature of Garmin Connect to auto-upload to both sites at the same time. So even though I may not use Endomondo all the time, I still get all my runs tracked in multiple places.