In the Archie Williams community, Strava is becoming a widely used app among students and individuals interested in fitness. Offering features such as joining clubs, route planning, GPS tracking, and goal setting, both students and staff are getting involved. Using it to stay motivated, users share their progress and connect with others who have similar activity interests, building community and striving for fitness.
Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath founded Strava in 2009, the two friends wanted to create a fun way for athletes to share their workouts and stay motivated. The app helps people track their exercise, including running, biking, or walking, using GPS. It shows how far and fast users move, tracking where athletes go on a map.
Strava has many easy ways to jump into the athletic community, including the club feature, which many Archie Williams athletes use. For sports that require trackable training, such as cross-country and track, teams can find Strava to be a valuable tool to use together. Archie Williams senior Will Mulliken is an avid user of this feature.
“[I am a part of] a club that’s mostly the Archie distance team,” Will said. “You can post to the club, or check who’s run the most that week. Even if it’s just basic info, it’s still fun.”
Athletes who compete against one another often follow each other on Strava to get inspired by routes and track each other’s progress. Accounts can be either public or private, making it optional to let users see your itinerary. Will uses a public account, but he recently began limiting what he shares, as his competitors can also use Strava to keep an eye on him.
“I’ve started only posting race results for the past few months, instead of automatically uploading everything. It’s just easier not having to think about people seeing every run and what pace I’m going. I also don’t really want others knowing what my training looks like, especially if I’m sick or taking time off,” Will said.
Strava also offers additional tools that athletes can utilize, including a segment leaderboard and a weekly mileage tracker. The leaderboard uses specific parts of a route and ranks users based on speed, allowing runners to earn digital “crowns” as awards for being the fastest. Meanwhile, the mileage tracker shows training statistics through graphs and statistics.
“Sometimes I’ll do a hard workout and then notice, ‘Oh, I was the fastest person to do this segment in the past year, [and] I can see my weekly mileage through this little graph that shows where my training is at. It’s not something I get super wrapped up in, but it is a cool feature,” Will said.
Archie Williams sophomore Keane Olshansky is a frequent hiker who also uses Strava in her own way. She activates Strava while going on hikes so that she can look back on the routes she frequents.
“It’s helpful to track my hikes, because some hikes start in one town in Marin, and they don’t end in that same town. I hike all over, so when I use Strava, I can track where I’ve been in the past. For example, in one month, I hike a little [in] Mill Valley, sometimes a little Point Reyes, or sometimes Corte Madera,” Keane said.
For Keane, Strava is not just a personal tool, as her family also uses it collectively. She hikes with her dad, and they both log their adventures on the app.
“Hiking is actually a great way to bond a father and daughter. We get to spend quality time together doing something active, which we can track [on Strava] and look back on later,” Keane said.
The app offers an interface that simplifies fitness tracking and encourages users to push themselves to achieve their goals. You can choose to share your information publicly or only with followers and adjust the app to fit your needs.
Some Strava members use the app solely for planning routes and tracking their progress for personal use. Others share activities or compete among friends on the platform and stay up-to-date on the community’s progress physically. For Archie Williams Athletic Director Jett Russell, Strava keeps his personal information and he uses it to plan and track his hikes through the app in his free time.
“The social part is actually [not that important]… “King of the Mountain” or the fastest time in a certain segment, I could care less about all that stuff… Yeah, I think it’s cool, that’s what people are into, because I can see how it does drive them, but for me, it’s just like I need to get outside today,” Russell said.
Strava enables individuals to continue connecting and exploring while staying active. Whether through sharing distance completed or elevation gained, many users in the Archie Williams community enjoy the app’s opportunities to keep up with both personal and communal fitness journeys.
