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.

Smashrun now displays more than 10 years of data. We had to make a few changes under the hood to make this possible. But one of the most visible was the need for more pixels to display all of that data. So, Smashrun needed to get a wee bit wider.

All these new pixels allowed some room for a few more data points. Pro users can now see elevation and heart rate on the Run list page, as well as seeing heart rate on the By Run page’s “fastest run for distance” list.

If you’ve got a very, long running history on Smashrun, then your All Time view may now seem a bit cluttered. The easiest fix for that is to set a “Hide runs before date” on your Settings – > Profile page. It’s relatively easy to flip on and off, and setting it can help you focus on your more recent training without getting too fixated on those PR’s that you set when you were a lot younger

A new quick view

If you hover over one of your fastest runs for a distance you’ll now see a quick view with the description of your run, a map, and some additional stats. This can make it easier to get some clarity on these runs without having to drill down to each one.

New integrations

We’ve added support for Adidas Running (AKA Runtastic). You can create a connection on your settings sync page. Adidas, has a pretty nice app for both Android and iPhone.

We’re working on adding support for Coros watches. We’ll start beta testing in the coming weeks, so shoot an email to hi@smashrun.com if you’re interested.

There’s also a new Google Play app called Health Sync which can sync from a variety of sources to Smashrun including some infrequently supported sources like Huawei Health and Samsung Health.

Odds and ends

You can now see the cut offs for speed ranks with distances you’ve never run. The friends panel also got a slight design tweak. And on the run list page we set it up, so that if you click on a heading it’ll highlight the highest values for that field.

(The mobile site is still limited to 10 years of data. We’ll address that in a future release)

Smashrun moved to a new Garmin API. If you’re having trouble syncing here’s what you need to do:

• Go to the Settings -> Sync page

• Under Garmin (auto-sync) if you you see a “Connect” button click it. This will open a popup. If it doesn’t it might be blocked by your browser. (Look for an unfamiliar icon in the browser url bar, and click it to enable popups). Login to Garmin Connect and follow the prompts.

• The popup should disappear and you’ll see a message “Connecting to Garmin”
• There’s about a 1 in 10 chance you’ll get a message saying “Garmin’s being weird”. We’re working on this, but the fix is easy, just try again.
• The next step is important. If you’re on a desktop, mouse over the gear and change the default import source to GarminHealth and then click the sync icon. If you’re on a phone click the hamburger menu on the right side and select “Sync GarminHealth”

If you’ve done this, and your runs still aren’t showing up it may be because of a limitation of the new Garmin API:

• The new API will only sync runs that originated from a Garmin watch. Garmin will not send runs from other sources to us, even if they’re on Garmin Connect.
• The run must be classified as a run on your watch. If you record it as another activity type and then change it to running on Garmin Connect, Garmin will not send it to us.
• New runs will be pushed automatically. You should not need to click sync unless you’re retrieving older runs that are missing on Smashrun.
• The new API is fire and forget. We ask Garmin for runs, and it gets back to us. We have no way of knowing how long it will take or if it will respond at all.
• We’ve currently capped historical sync at April 11th because we are having issues with duplicates, missing runs, and multisport/triathlon runs. When we work out these issues we’ll enable full historical sync.
• The old sync was much better at importing historical data. If you are having trouble importing data please do not delete your account and create a new account.

If you have missing runs, remember you can always import the FIT files from Garmin Connect.

To do this:

• View the activity on Garmin Connect and mouse over the gear on the right hand side.

• Export original source

• Import the file into Smashrun

I know for some of you this transition has been really frustrating, things were working well, and now they’re not. We’re committed to working through all the issues, we’re just a bit overwhelmed, so it may take some time. Don’t give up. We’ll address every issue to the full extent that we’re capable.

The data we’re receiving from Garmin’s API is currently experiencing delays of between 30mins to 12 hours. If you’re connected to Garmin you’ll likely see summary data only, while we wait for Garmin to send the detailed information.

I know this is frustrating, and I’m sorry for the inconvenience. We’ve reached out to Garmin and are awaiting a resolution.

We’re moving to the updated Garmin API.

If you currently import from Garmin take a second right now and go to your Settings Sync Page and connect your account to the new Garmin API.

This new Garmin API is replacing our existing API connection starting today, so please make sure you connect.

Once you’re connected your next run will automatically sync to Smashrun as soon as it arrives on Garmin Connect. That means no more need to click the sync button. (If you’re a Pro user once you move to the new API everything should be the same as it was.)

For the moment historical synchronization from the Garmin API will be disabled. If you’re an existing user, this shouldn’t make a difference at all. If you’re a new user then check back next week after we work out all the bugs with historical import (or use a 3rd party site like Fitness Syncer).

UPDATE 4/8/21

We had a deadline from Garmin to switch to this new API, so unfortunately these changes had to go live for everyone before we had done the usual beta testing. We’re continuously releasing patches, so please report any issues you spot and we’ll keep knocking away at them.

Tonight we released a major rewrite of our import architecture in preparation for migrating to the Garmin Health API.

Smashrun has integrations for a lot of different sources, and then there’s our API, and FIT/TCX/GPX file import, and of course import via email. And it’s all inextricably intertwined. We’ve done a lot of testing over the past week, but there’s a lot of moving parts, and we updated a *lot* of lines of code, and well….it’s been a long night, and it’s not entirely impossible that we broke something.

If all goes well then everything should work exactly the same as it always has. However, if you happen to notice any unexpected behavior, anything weird or out of place, please shoot us an email at hi@smashrun.com and we’ll sort it out.