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Hand-drawn Beeminder and Strava logos

It’s finally official! Strava activities can now be automatically tracked with Beeminder!

So, first of all, welcome Strava users! Beeminder takes a large goal, such as training for a marathon, and breaks it down into daily deadlines. Not by providing any insight into marathon training schedules (we assume you have other sources for that) but just by making those daily deadlines deadly serious. Beeminding means committing to keep all your datapoints on track towards your goal every day or else pay a fine. Beeminder displays your progress on a graph and sends you reminders about how much you need to do by when. If you always stay on track, you never pay anything. Despite the dead seriousness, we’re very friendly about this and guarantee that you’ll never go off track due to any technicality or confusion or injury. (In case that friendliness defeats the point for you, you can opt in to weaselproofing, but now we’re getting ahead of ourselves.) Beeminder’s ever-present threat of stinging you where it hurts (we mean your wallet) can be just the push you need to consistently stick with your training and achieve your fitness goals!

The first thing you have to decide when creating a Beeminder goal is what you’re going to measure. You’ve got Strava to do the measuring so you can pick anything Strava keeps track of:

  • distance (in miles or kilometers)
  • activity time (in total hours)
  • number of activities
  • calories

You can track any (or all!) of a huge variety of activities from running to yoga to backcountry skiing!

Screenshot of choosing from Strava activities list

After that there are the questions about exactly how much you want to commit to and whether you want to be on the hook immediately or give yourself some initial safety buffer before Beeminder gets all harsh-mistress on you. But once you’re set up, you shouldn’t have to touch Beeminder at all. Just keep it happy by logging more time and distance on Strava.

We’re really excited about this new integration! And thanks to Strava for featuring us in their integrations gallery. If you’re excited too, dive in:

Create a Strava goal!

But before we go, a couple notes for Beeminder veterans. First, if you’re a very long-time veteran you might know that Beeminder user Seth Herr made a prototype 3rd-party Strava+Beeminder integration several years ago, which did just enough to solve his own problem — syncing his Strava runs with Beeminder. He then generalized it a bit and invited others to use it. Unfortunately it then broke a few years ago. But we love that this started with a user scratching an itch and are very proud to have an API that makes such itch-scratching possible.

Finally, this integration now has one feature none of the other Beeminder integrations do. Namely, every datapoint has a link to the corresponding workout on Strava.

Screenshot of Strava data on Beeminder

In my case, that’s mostly me chasing bikes on my skates. But whatever your twisted relationship with Nature and/or exercise, go forth! If you’re in the northern hemisphere, enjoy daylight savings time while it lasts! And as the days get short and you get lazy, Beeminder will be there nipping at your heels and cracking the whip.


 

Image credit: Seth Herr of bikeindex.org (and who also built the first unofficial Strava-Beeminder integration!)

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