Is Strava Good or Bad for Skiers and Outdoor Athletes?

In high school, I got hooked on running by joining the cross-country team.

The buzz I felt after surviving another race—and then 20 more—kept me coming back. A new motivator propelled me back into the streets years after I graduated and stopped running competitively, though. 

I bought a smart watch, downloaded the social media and fitness app Strava, and suddenly, I could visualize my progress, including splits, pace, and distance over time. I planned to cap off a few months of training with an unofficial five-kilometer race and followed through. 

It felt good. I also had reservations. Strava has public leaderboards, stats, and awards, all of which can be used as a fulcrum to weigh yourself against others, sometimes negatively.

With that comes the temptation to only show the world the best bits of ourselves—along with the associated consequences. It left me with a question: Is Strava good for skiers and other outdoor athletes?

Keep reading for more.

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The Digital Race

Hayley Russell, who has a PhD in sports psychology, studies the implications of Strava use. While her research focuses on runners, she believes it applies broadly to other endurance athletes, too, including skiers. 

One of her findings was that some runners would hide their slower runs using Strava’s privacy functionality. I recognized this behavior immediately. I’ve done it—not that my fast days are awe-inspiring.

“That can make other people feel bad if they think like, ‘Oh, other people's runs are always good, and mine are up and down,’” Russell said.

A leaderboard-driven mindset can cloud time spent outside, too—or at least make for an obsessive approach to sports. Cody Townsend, the professional skier behind the popular web series The Fifty, admitted that, in the past, he got sucked into stat chasing while mountain biking, repeating the same trail over and over again to inch a few seconds higher on the leaderboard.

“You're like, ‘This is so stupid,’” he said. “I should just go ride a different trail.” 

Others have chronicled more extreme versions of this behavior. Some anecdotes teeter on the absurd. Writing for Wired, Jeff Foss recounted that he was chided by his wife for pausing and unpausing Strava on a family hike each time they stopped. He also had to fight the urge to use the app on a rescue mission in the mountains.

Among the crowd who insist on purely skiing or recreating for the soul, not the best stats, Strava’s competitive bent may be its worst trait. Ski writer Megan Michelson argued in an essay that backcountry skiers should turn off the app entirely. 

“If you're out backcountry skiing to set a record pace to the summit or log more vert than the other guy, I feel like you're missing the point,” she wrote, adding, later on, “Exercise is certainly a positive side effect of a day of touring, but it is never my main objective.”

Michelson prefers her friends and the fresh snow.

Social Networking? Or Social Media?

Townsend, though, ultimately had a nuanced take on Strava. His stat-chasing stint, he pointed out, made him a better mountain biker, even as he acknowledged that gamifying outdoor sports can become toxic.

Personally, he uses Strava to monitor the activities of a few of his local friends, noting that the app feels more like “social networking” than “social media.”

I understood. When I open Instagram, I'm bombarded by reels and other algorithmic slop that I have no personal connection to. Strava, instead, shows me what my friends are doing in the mountains or on the trail.

Russell, the researcher, found something similar: Strava isn’t only a venue where our egos can chafe against the digital sphere—for some, it’s a source of motivation and connection. At the same time, Russell said, the app can show that even the most experienced athletes sometimes run slow or for shorter durations, the opposite of the curated highlight reels you might find elsewhere online (and, in some cases, on Strava, when people only share their best times). 

“It allowed them to connect with friends that were all over the world in a way that felt more authentic than just posting on other forms of social media,” Russell said of the runners she’s interviewed.

Strava may have brought fitness data collection—and a sometimes fraught form of digital comparison—to the masses. However, tracking physical aptitude isn’t new. To some, like professional skier Mali Noyes, it’s long been a part of their life.

Formerly, she was a competitive Nordic skier. Now, she directs her appetite for endurance slogs towards tough ski mountaineering lines. She recently skied all of the routes in The Chuting Gallery, an iconic Utah backcountry skiing guidebook, in only 47 days, setting a new record.

Noyes has tracked her endurance fitness since she was 13, comparing her data to a diary. She’s also seen the benefit of keeping tabs on metrics like pace and heart rate through her boyfriend's eyes, who used to be a park skier but has since taken an interest in endurance sports. He started with a heart rate monitor, Noyes said, but now knows and trusts his body well enough to go without it. He even joined her for much of The Chuting Gallery push.

“It's so cool to see that for him, and see how when you're putting in the work, you do progress,” Noyes said, adding that she thinks fitness tracking can be empowering when appropriately used. 

Heatmaps and Backcountry Trails

Backcountry skiing, with its questions of avalanche awareness and land use, complicates the picture. When you log a backcountry tour and post it publicly on Strava, the world can see the path of whatever line you skied. 

That prompted Townsend to make his ski touring activities mostly private on Strava. As for why, he cited something other than preserving his ego: he does so to avoid drawing attention to certain areas. In some of those zones, there are parking issues and homeowners who look down on backcountry skiing, he said.

“I'm like, wait a minute. I need to make sure that I'm not exposing this terrain to too many people, so that it's creating user conflicts,” Townsend noted. He added that he might share some trips, though, and, after our conversation, publicly posted a backcountry outing from Alaska.

Townsend also brought up Strava's heatmaps. The app compiles the movements of users and shows concentrated areas of activity in the form of glowing blobs or colored paths, indicating that on one mountain side or another, people are backcountry skiing (you can opt out of this system, if you like). 

While Strava includes map layers that show slope angle and aspect—both valuable tools for safely navigating avalanche terrain—it doesn’t include avalanche forecasts or specific backcountry ski itineraries, offering a much smaller tranche of particulars than the mapping app onX.  

“It's just the fact that there's no information. They give you one thing: that a lot of people go there,” Townsend said. “We work so hard, I think, as an outdoor industry and a ski industry, about educating people, because we know the dangers of it. I know I do.” 

A Strava spokesperson said in an email that its heatmaps “don’t assess suitability or conditions for a specific individual, as that is incredibly broad. Decisions about where and how to recreate in winter environments involve many factors beyond what any single map can convey.”

“We always recommend users consult current avalanche forecasts, local conditions, and their own level of expertise before making decisions,” the spokesperson added.

When asked, they didn’t say if the app will include more avalanche information in the future, although Strava did recently announce a suite of features, like run totals and lift station locations, for downhill skiers. The company’s goal is to “provide general terrain awareness in winter environments,” the spokesperson said.

Rope Tow Hot Laps

Strava, I ultimately learned, sits at the center of many overlapping factors: self-esteem, psychology, athletics, and technology, among them. But if you step back and don’t think too hard about it, the app is also just a fun gizmo.

Perhaps the best example of that is Trollhaugen, Wisconsin, a ski area known for its strong snowboarding culture and rope tow-powered terrain parks. There, local snowboarders have started using Strava to track the distance they travel during a tow session as they spin hundreds of laps, sliding rails along the way.

Grady Tank, who grew up riding Trollhaugen, said it started “kind of sarcastically.” There is something funny about snowboarders using an app made for cyclists clad in Lycra, after all.
So are the paths they draw on their Strava maps. Instead of a winding route through the mountains, they’re perfect ovals, like a warped bullseye over Valhalla, a terrain park at Trollhaugen.  

How far can you make it riding the rope? Tank estimated that you can notch 50-plus miles in one undistracted session—an impressive stat given that Trollhaugen only has a vertical drop of 280 feet.

Now, later this season, the ski area is hosting an event called The Longest Lap, where, using Strava, skiers and snowboarders will compete to see who can travel the furthest riding up and down the rope tow. The race lasts for 16 and a half hours, with breaks allowed.

“It goes back to kind of child thinking, who can go the fastest and actually get the highest number on the phone,” Tank said. “While you can take it seriously … it's interesting to look at, just to put numbers behind something that a lot of us really didn't think about for a long time.”