We’ve changed some of Smashrun’s heart rate zones. We renamed a few of them, added a zone, and tweaked the colors to better align with typical HRR usage.

The old zones looked like this:

The new ones:

We’ve introduced a new shade of orange in the middle zones, and the overall colors are a bit more vibrant. The screenshots below compare the same run before and after the change. It’s a subtle change, the most salient aspect of it being that > 60% HRR looks now a bit more like it feels…not quite a green “recovery” run, but rather something more, a yellowy, not really working hard, but definitely not slouching it either kind of exertion.

The other aspect, dropping the red line threshold from 97% to 95% makes that band a bit more useful. No one really exceeds a 97% HRR unless they’re running a staircase race on a hot day, but 95% you can often surpass here and there with just some really painful intervals.

The ideal, of course, would is the ability to set your own zones. That’s not possible yet, but at least this change should align more with the most common HRR zones and provide a bit more resolution.

Also remember, if you feel like your HR zones are always at the low end make sure that your max and resting heart rate zones are set appropriately. You can set both those values on your Settings > Profile page under the category “User Information”.

We’ve retired the Diddy badge and replaced it with a new Joe Strummer badge “Train in Vain”.

It’s so named for both a single off the Clash’s “London Calling”, as well as for Joe Strummer’s marathon training regimen which is notable chiefly for its distinct lack of existence.

If you’ve already earned the Diddy badge, you get to keep it under the limited edition badge section, perhaps you might consider it a historical artifact.

We’ve added a small new feature for Smashrun PRO users with extensive running history. Smashrun will now estimate your historical max heart rate when setting heart zones on the Training Bands and on the PRO map.

For example, if you’re 40 years old, Smashrun will estimate your max heart rate was about 10 bpm higher when you were 25 and adjust the scale accordingly. This means that the heart rate zones on the Training Bands view is now dynamic.

You can turn off this feature in the Settings under Pro Configuration if you prefer.

Today’s a big day for the small number of dedicated Smashrunners who set their sites on the Leap Year Sweep this year and successfully completed the challenge.

A year-long streak is never easy. There’s never a year without adversity. We all have bad days. We travel. We get sick. We feel lazy or down. And there are days when we don’t know how we’re going to get everything done—and yet, somehow, we also find time for a run.

When you’re running a streak, you have to run even when it’s the last thing you want to do. And that’s the magic of it. You discover that, almost always, even a short run makes you feel better—even when you’re convinced it won’t.

Running is universal medicine. When you leave the house and go for a run—no matter the pace, no matter the distance—you come home in a different, almost always better, place.

So, congratulations to all of you who sought out that medicine 366 times this past year no matter how bitter it may have seemed at the time.

UPDATE 1/1/2025

With (presumably) all of last year’s runs now logged, it appears that 3 of the 5 runners who completed 366-day streaks during the previous three leap years also earned the badge this year.

Of the two runners who didn’t complete 366 days this year, one made it all the way to the end of November before missing a day, while the other stopped logging runs in August.

An impressive 785 runners completed the Leap Year Sweep this year. Here’s the final breakdown:

• 3 runners achieved four 366-day streaks.
• 45 runners achieved three 366-day streaks.
• 298 runners achieved two 366-day streaks.
• 1,285 runners achieved one 366-day streak.

Thanks to the generous support of our users, we hope Smashrun will be here in 2029 to help you track your next Leap Year Sweep!

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.
• Pro Badge Series
  A new set of badges to earn and keep you motivated in the new year
• Enhanced weekly run report
  We’ve added new charts and graphs to the weekly run report that are only available to pro members.
  

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

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.

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.