“It wasn’t really about, ‘Oh, I can do that, but how does it make me feel?'” she says. “I think there are many positives to using Strava, but have you balanced them out with the potential negatives of using Strava like any other fitness tracker?”
Russell and his colleagues, including Charlie Potts, who studies social media, identified an easy-to-find and ideal target for analysis. These include students who run at a critical point in their identity formation, and students who use social media frequently as college students. .
In the first study, published in Recreational Sports Journal, researchers found that a group of 18 students from a running club on a U.S. campus recognized the reality that there were pros and cons to using Strava. I discovered that there is. Some participants said the app fostered community and healthy competition. Others said they recognized that using the tool could cause them anxiety when deciding how to present their workouts to their followers and when making comparisons.
This discovery led Russell and his colleagues to study a second group in 2023, this time of professional and semi-professional runners. Although there was some overlap with the first study’s findings, the researchers found that elite runners thought more critically about using Strava, likely due to their age and running experience.
“Many participants thought it was transactional. They wanted to know what their competitors were doing,” Russell said. “So they felt they had to share what they were doing.”
Like recreational runners, they were concerned about how others perceived them, but even more so they sought to control how they were perceived. For example, Russell said, it will hide data that it deems undesirable, such as an increase in heart rate during a “slow” run. Or maybe you’re undermining your own running by naming your activity, suggesting you’re feeling sick, running with someone else, or suggesting your partner is a slow runner. certify what you consider to be a “bad” run.
