The Summer solstice is coming up this weekend, and that means Smashrun Pro users get a shot at one of the most challenging and coveted badges – “The Longest Day”.

To get the badge, you’ll need to run twice on the day of the solstice. The runs can be any length, but the first one needs to start before sunrise and finish afterward, and the second one needs to start before sunset and finish after.

These 2 runs will be as far apart as they can possibly be because – solstice. You can think of it as a chance to align your running with the rhythm of the universe, or to celebrate a new pandemic free future on the horizon, or more to the point, think of it as a chance to get one of the few Smashrun badges that’s both rare and possible to get in just one day.

Here’s a few important tips:

• The Solstice is on either this Thursday or Friday depending on your time zone. Ask Google.

• Check the sunrise/sunset time online for your exact location. We use the exact moment of sunrise/sunset at your exact GPS location, so if you’re using a nearby city for reference it could be a tiny bit off. Your best bet is usually to just ask Google.

• Build in a buffer. It takes time to get ready when you’re tired, and it’s also a near guarantee that your watch is going to choose this day of all days to take 5 minutes to get GPS.
• RUN OUTSIDE. The whole point is to watch the sunrise and set. You should feel one with nature, and remember the experience, yaddda, yadda, earn a badge. A treadmill run won’t count. You need GPS.
• If you live south of the equator, then just substitute shortest for longest and winter for summer, but otherwise everything else still applies.

Coros

There’s been an ongoing issue with the Coros import which would cause the connection to fail after 30 days. Runs would continue to import, but the detailed information would not. This issue should now be resolved.

If you are experiencing this issue you will need to go to your Settings > Sync page and disconnect and then reauthorize Coros for the fix to take effect.

Note: Coros has recently instituted a change to its API preventing the import of runs older than 90 days. If you want to export data older than 90 days from Coros you will need to request an export by emailing support@coros.com  they will send you a ZIP file which you should be able to import directly into Smashrun. You can also export individual runs as FIT or GPX files and import them into Smashrun.

https://support.coros.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043975752-How-to-export-workout-data-from-COROS-and-manually-upload-to-3rd-party-apps

Polar

There’s been an ongoing issue where the details of some Polar historical imports are not showing up. This issue was patched this weekend, and where possible the historical data was corrected

If you’re having trouble getting your old Polar runs to show up correctly please reach out to hi@smashrun.com and we’ll investigate.

Once every four years Smashrun users have a chance to try for one of the rarest and most challenging Smashrun badges – the Leap Year Sweep. To earn it you’ll need to run on every one of the 366 days in 2024.

It’s an opportunity to transform your health and your relationship with running, but in order to pull it off you’ll need to schedule carefully, make many small sacrifices, and exercise incredible discipline.

The rules are simple. Starting on January 1st, 2024 and continuing everyday until December 31st, 2024 you’ll need to log at least one run on Smashrun. A run of any length will count, but in the past most recipients have aimed for at least 1mi or 2km a day.

If you’ve done a streak before, than you probably know that running streaks are a little bit magic. The big reason for this is that you never know when the truly wonderful runs are going to making an appearance. You can feel 100% sure that going for a run sounds like the worst idea, and then just be completely, utterly wrong.

The point of running everyday for a year, is that despite your best intuition, the opportunities for great runs are going to be scattered roughly randomly throughout your year. You just have no idea of where they’re going to be.

Sometimes they come after a completely exhausting day at work. Or sometimes you set a PR outrunning an approaching storm. And sometimes you’re just feeling down and overwhelmed and the last thing in the world that you want to do is get off the couch, but then you do, because you have to, because you’re on a streak, and you have no choice, and somehow you come back from that run a completely different person. Just like magic.

So this year open yourself up for a little magic. Go for the streak. If you succeed you’ll earn at least at least 5 badges and if you don’t you can always try again in another 4 years.

Note: Pro users can choose to reearn their badges. If you’ve already earned the Leap Year Sweep in 2020 (or 2016!) you can attempt it again by going to Settings > Pro Configuration and choosing “Reearn badges” on or before January 1st.

Running is just better with friends. You can help each other improve, cheer each new accomplishment, and keep one another motivated. And right now, you can get a free matching gift membership when you upgrade your account or renew early.

You can also buy a discounted membership as a gift (for yourself even), if you’re not interested in the “buy one give one.” To do this, the trick is to first logout. Then go to the gift page directly. You can give the discounted gift to a friend or claim it yourself.

You can use pro features to help you learn from your best runs, prepare for your next race, or just help keep you motivated to stick with your commitment to your training.

You can learn more about Smashrun Pro by checking out our Pro FAQ.

Remember our holiday sale is designed to introduce new users to Smashrun Pro, so the matching gift is for users who haven’t tried Smashrun Pro before. If you want to renew a friend’s Smashrun Pro membership, you can also log out of your Smashrun account and then buy a gift membership at a big discount.

With Pro, you’ll both have access to:

• Progress Towards Goal
  Reach your goals by knowing what distances you need to run to stay on target.
• Training Bands
  Visualize training intensities by pace, HR, and hill grade to understand your past and current training load.
• Pro Map
  Get a detailed breakdown of your custom laps, HR zones, pace buckets, and your fastest segments.
• Pace Trends
  Track your best performing runs to measure your long-term improvement.
• Analyze Run View
  Learn from your best runs by analyzing what worked and what didn’t in the training leading up to a race.
• 8 New Leaderboards
  Include leaderboards for performance, duration, elevation, and 5 other metrics in your weekly friend report.
• PR Progress
  Plot your historical PR’s and use them to identify PR’s you can beat.
• Trend Comparison
  Compare your training to friends and other runners and visualize changes in distance, devotion, and speed.
• Automatic Sync
  Garmin, Suunto, and Polar watches will automatically push every new run to Smashrun.
• Pro Badge Series
  A new set of badges to earn and keep you motivated in the new year

You also get access to the Smashrun Performance Index, Pace Stability, Stryd Power display, Garmin Laps, and the ability to compare your training trends and performance vs other runners on Smashrun.

Happy holidays, Chris, Jacklyn, and Steve

We’ve had a bunch of new Strava users register over the last 3 days, and it looks like they pushed us over our API rate limits. This likely means that a many of you had trouble syncing from Strava.

Strava has a 15 minute rate limit and a daily limit. So if you have trouble syncing, you might have luck if you try early in the day, or at 16, 31, 46, or 1 minute past the hour.

You can also always import from Garmin directly or export the TCX and FIT file and import that by emailing it to: your.username@smashrunimport.com (remember to email the file from the address you registered with)

As the new users taper off things should return to normal, and you should have no trouble syncing at all in a few days. Apologies to everyone for the inconvenience.

Your friends are out there doing some amazing runs. Sometimes, what’s really amazing is that they’re finally getting back in the groove after life took them away from it for a while. Other times, the amazing thing is that they’ve been steadily working towards their goals for months without fail. Or it could be that they’re finally hitting their goals, setting PR’s and achieving things they set their sites upon years ago.

Whatever they’re doing, wherever they are in their training, the fact is, having someone recognize their hard work and perseverance can make all the difference.

The problem is that it can be hard to keep track of it all. Have they started running regularly again? Was that last race a personal record? Did they really run before 6am three times last week?

That’s the problem we’re trying to solve. Smashrun’s Friend Report doesn’t just tell you how much your friends ran, instead it does its best to put that running in context.

The new Smashrun Friend Report gets sent out every Tuesday and will show weekly highlights for each of your friends. And if you want, it can also include a number of different leaderboards – you can select the ones you care about or turn them all off entirely.

You can configure the report exactly how you want (or disable it entirely) by going to the Settings > Report page.

The Analyze Run View is one of the most powerful features of Smashrun Pro, and it’s now available directly from the By Run page. The great thing about this feature is how quickly you can see a wealth of information about your recent training.

The view is composed of two parts. The top half shows a distribution of all your runs in the past 90 days based on a metric that you select. You can select either distance, pace, heart rate, or SPI and immediately see the distribution of that metric for your past 90 days training.

The bottom half shows a timeline of when you ran over the past 90 days. You can hover over any of these days to see the details of the runs on that day.

The magic happens when you use the two parts in concert. Using the top half you can select any part of the distribution, for example you can select distances over 10k or average heart rates in certain zone say, 140 – 160bpm. When you highlight these runs, the timeline lights up to reveal when those runs occurred.

Now that you’ve selected the stat you’re interested in, you can see aggregate date for that selection: total duration and distance, as well as the count of runs, and what percentage of the total training fell into the selected range.

You can use all of his in a number of ways, for example you can see:

In the leadup to a marathon you can quickly see how many runs were over 20km and when they occurred.

If you’re preparing for a 10km you could check how many hours of runs were at your approximate race pace.

Or if you’re alternating runs and walks, you can highlight a pace band and quickly see what percentage of your runs were walks compared to runs, and see how much time you spent doing each.

The Polar historical data importer is up and running. If you need to import historical data directly from Polar you can do that easily by creating the connection on the Settings Sync page.

Please remember to set a minimum import date as appropriate to prevent the possibility of duplicate data.

If you’re already using the Polar (autosync) connection and you have no historical data to import then there’s no need to change anything.

Polar Integration

The Polar historical data importer broke last month. We need to make some sizable changes on our side to remedy the issue and it’s taking longer than anticipated. That said, if you only need to import new runs you can still connect to Polar (autosync) from your Settings Sync Page. This connection will automatically push your new runs directly to Smashrun shortly after they’re available on Polar Flow. While this won’t solve everyone’s use case, for many of you this should be a convenient and easy to implement option.

Strava Integration

We’ve made some adjustments to the import to capture race and treadmill flags and tag the runs as appropriate. We’ve also changed to combine the Strava activity title and description in the Smashrun description field. We heard from some user’s who made a case for this, but if it’s not working out for you just reach out with your ideas, and maybe we can find a better way to do it.

Coros Integration

We identified a bug that was affecting some users which prevented runs from flowing through automatically. This was patched this morning and should put the issue to bed.

Holiday sale

You still have a few days to take advantage of the Smashrun BOGO holiday sale. You can pickup a matching subscription for any new Smashrun Pro user by signing up for Pro or even by renewing early.

A baby girl

After working on Smashrun together for almost a decade, Jacklyn and I had a baby girl a couple of weeks ago. If we’ve both been a bit slow responding to emails lately, I know that you will understand. Thanks so much for your support over the years that’s allowed us to keep our dreams alive.

It’s that time of year. The Winter Solstice is coming up soon, and if you time your runs correctly there’s a badge in it for you. To earn “The Shortest Day” you’ll need to complete two runs on the day of the solstice. The first needs to start before sunrise and finish after and the second needs to start before sunset and finish after it goes beneath the horizon.

Running can run the gamut between being a complete drudge, and a truly spiritual experience. This run will almost certainly be one of the two. You’ll be strapping on your kicks, and going out in the dark and also, possibly, the bitter cold. While you wait for your GPS to sync you may think to yourself “This is it. The earth has moved as far as it can go in one direction and from tomorrow it will start to come back. This day has signified the cycle of death and rebirth among human cultures across the globe since time immemorial” or you may think “I can’t feel my toes.” You just don’t know how it will go until you give it a try.

The Solstice Badge is a chance to roll the dice, to take a chance on something truly meaningful, to feel your heart beat in your chest, to see your breath explode into the air, to watch the sun crest the horizon, and then later to watch it fall beneath the earth. Set your alarm! Take the chance!

Here are some important things to remember:

• The solstice happens at the same moment across the globe, but it will happen in very different time zones. This year in most places in the world it will occur on Tuesday, December 21st. Confirm the date and sunrise, sunset times with Google.

• Treadmill runs don’t count. Treadmills are cold machinations isolating you from the natural glory of your local suburban through road. Also, we need GPS to figure out the time of the sunrise and sunset.

• Give yourself enough time. You need to get dressed, get out the door and get GPS before the sun crests the horizon. You can count on the fact that GPS will take longer to sync when you’re shivering in the predawn cold. It’s best to start a bit before sunrise, and finish a little while after.
  
• If you’re south of the equator. Then this will be your Summer Solstice. The day will be long, it will probably pretty warm, and your badge will blue and orange.