For my efforts, I can be given “kudos” by anyone who follows me – the Strava “like”, signified by a thumbs up – and I can do the same for them. It is addictive, to watch these ghosts in the machine, and see where they got away, or where I caught them up, to see if they went wrong and how badly. After a race, I can launch Strava’s Flyby feature, an ingenious interactive map, and watch my digital self rerun the race route alongside anyone else who ran it. In my local park, I can see how my 2017 self did on a segment someone has named Up the Bloody Hill, or on Stairway to Heaven (actually steps to the car park), or on #Weeeeeeeeeee! My efforts can be scored on “leaderboards” so that I can compare myself with myself, with my Strava followers and friends, or with strangers from Korea to Kansas.īecause of Strava, I know how many miles my shoes have covered and whether I need new ones, as the app will email me to tell me (without sending me ads for shoes). Athletes – as Strava flatteringly calls its users – can create a “segment”, a portion of a route, perhaps featuring a hill or a stretch of lake, against which other athletes can then match their own efforts. Every run I do is recognised and automatically matched to anyone else who has run the same route, or part of it. Strava tells me how fast I ran in May 2015 or last Thursday, and how much improvement I have made. For an amateur, the data available from Strava is like having a Team GB coach in your phone, for free.

As long as you have a smartphone, watch or bike computer that records your activities using GPS, you can sync it with Strava, then upload your run, cycle, ski or almost any other activity, and be rewarded with astonishing levels of data analysis. Strava is a fitness and sports tracking platform that launched in 2009 and bills itself the “number one app for runners and cyclists”. The fell runners knew, as millions of people worldwide do, that if it isn’t on Strava, it didn’t happen.

Soon after finishing the race, most of the runners would upload that GPS data to a digital platform that has changed the world of amateur sport. But tracking and measuring were just the start. When it comes to tracking and measuring runs, and being obsessed with data, we are right up there with the rest of the field. The moor birds’ cheeps were now accompanied by beeps.

Yet, at the start of the race, two things happened: 400 feet started to move, and 200 fingers pressed a button on a wristwatch equipped with GPS, setting the devices to record.

Relive and strava