Better streak tracking

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We’ve adjusted the streak tracker to make it a bit easier to keep track of your current streak. Now, if you’re running a streak but it’s not your longest streak, we display your current streak alongside your longest streak.

Like this…

And likewise if you’re taking a break from running, but it’s not the longest break you’ve taken, then we also show your current break.

Like this…

That said, if you’re not on a streak or on a break (or if your longest streak/break is the one you’re currently in the middle of) the streak tracker will look the same as it always has.

This release also contains dozens of assorted bug fixes. If you’ve reported a problem recently then the odds are that it should be patched in this release. If not, let us know, as we’ll sort it out.

Earn badges again

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Update Jan 3, 2020. If you decide to reset your badges, but you’re also going for the 366 days in a year badge, then you’ll run into an issue, because your badges will start counting from the day you reset it. Email us at hi@smashrun.com and we’ll manually adjust the reset date to Jan 1.

For many of us there’s this kind of honeymoon period with the badges on Smashrun. You earn a few badges, it seems silly, but fun. You set your eyes for some harder ones. Before you know it you’re running a streak, you’re building a staircase, you’re piling on longer and longer runs each month. And what started out as just a little fun, has ended up transforming you into altogether better runner. It’s the Smashrun magic.

But then you run out of badges to earn. The magic wears off a bit. Sure you don’t need badges to motivate you to run, but it might be nice to have something to shoot for again.

Starting today, we’ve got a pretty good solution to this problem. If you’re a Smashrun pro user you can go to your Settings page and select reearn badges.

What this will do, is take all of your existing badges and add a +1. That’s it. All the badges will start again with your next run. Run a mile or more for your next run – You’ll get the 1 mile badge. Good on ya!

Now, let’s say, you do this, and suddenly you think: “Good lord, what have I done! I only had one stair left in my Towering Staircase. Now I’m back at the first step!”

No problem. Just click Undo. This will get rid of your +1’s and flatten everything out just the way it used to be.

So, let 2020 be a year of badges! Start your staircase. Kick off your streak. Or just take the simple pleasure of counting off each new month with 10 days of running.

The Leap Year Sweep

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It’s a new year, a new decade, and a chance to put your running front and center. 2020 is also a leap year, and that means that it’s a chance to pick up one of the most rare and coveted badge on Smashrun – the Leap Year Sweep.

To get it you’ll need to run every single day for 366 days starting on Jan 1. There’s no minimum distance requirement (although some people set one for themselves). You just have to run Every. Single. Day.

That means scheduling, making sacrifices, and being very, very careful to avoid injury. You’ll need to listen to your body, keep the long range goal in mind, and not take risks by going too hard or too far than your body is ready.

If you pull it off, you’ll earn at least 5 badges, but more importantly you’ll have taken your running to a whole new level.

There’s a reason that just 137 people have earned it. If you want to take a shot you have to commit now and stick with it. Are you in?

NOTE
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We hit Strava’s daily rate limit today. This is pretty disappointing, but the first time it has happened so far. We’ve had a lot of new registrations connecting to Strava today, so hoping this won’t be a problem going forward.

That unfortunately means, until the rate limit resets, you’ll need to upload a TCX or FIT file.

Plan your goals

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You can now setup your goals for months in future. It’s simple. Just select the date, and add your goal. 🙂

* Note that the dates will be greyed out because there’s no data yet.

Virtual Runs
We’ve also added another small improvement. If you run on a a treadmill that does virtual runs (like a Zwift for example), then you may find yourself collecting location notables for places you’ve never physically been. You can now tag these runs as “Virtual” and that will solve the problem.

New integrations are live

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Import for Suunto, Polar, Strava, Fitbit and MapMyRun

You can now import from 5 new sources: Polar, Suunto, Strava, Fitbit and MapMyRun!

This means that Smashrun now supports every single app and watch with an open API. There’s still a lot of closed ecosystems out there (we’re looking at you Nike), but this should still give you a lot of flexibility to run with what you want, and use it with Smashrun.

Some things to keep in mind before syncing a newly supported source:

  • We try to do our best to prevent duplicates, but for some of these sources the start times can be a little off the original source. This can sometimes create dupes, if you already have runs on Smashrun that you’ve synced another way. So remember: set a minimum import date.
  • If you notice an issue, please send us an email at hi@smashrun.com We’ve done our best to address all the issues that came up in the beta, but sometimes there’s problems unique to certain accounts or certain runs, we’ll fix them as soon as we can, but be sure to let us know.
  • Remember, there’s a ton of ways to get your data on Smashrun. In addition to syncing from a support source, you can import via email, use an integrated app, or import FIT/TCX/GPX files directly. You can even zip up a whole bunch of files and import that.
  • More importantly, there’s also a ton of ways to get data out of Smashrun. Unlike many sites we’ve spent a lot of time making sure you can easily export high quality data and store it for you records, or use it on another site.
    • You can request a full export.
    • You can export individual runs.
    • You can use our API (immediately without prior approval).
    • You can export a CSV file you can use in Excel

Thanks to all the beta testers who helped us iron out the bugs! We couldn’t have done it without you.

Revising your Run Report

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Do you ever get your Weekly Run Report on Monday, and then immediately get a sinking feeling because you forgot to upload your long run on Sunday, but now it’s too late?

Starting this Monday, there’s a solution for that. If you add old runs after the run report goes out we’ll automatically send you a revised version with the new updates included. This process will run once per hour in the 24 hours after the run report goes out. As long as you remember to sync your runs sometime in that period you’ll soon find a revised report in your inbox.

New ways to highlight your best runs

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When a friend asks you, “How was your run?” there’s usually a lot more to share than just how far and how fast you ran. Maybe it was a slog along a muddy trail by a river, or maybe it was hilly race on country roads in the rain. Now you can share those details on Smashrun.

Let’s say you’re feeling pretty good about your last run. The first step is to click the like button. Liking your own run will alert your friends that you’re feeling pretty good about it, and it will show up in their notifications feed. Then you can add tags to fill your friends in on the details. 

But, let’s say you’re not feeling that great about a run. It’s not a bad run per se, maybe it’s just the kind of run you don’t want to bother your friends with. For example, a short recovery run where you took a long break in the middle for a visit to a public restroom. If you click the new “No Social” tag, the run will disappear from the social feed entirely. 

Note: If you have social disabled, this is entirely unnecessary because all your runs are private.

 

When you’re tagging a run you feel pretty good about using any of the tags on the tag popup will modify your notification. When the algorithm can figure out a way it will combine the tags to come up with a meaningful notification.

Here are just a few examples of the kinds of notifications you can create:

(hard + no sleep + parkrun)

 

(muddy + hill repeats + new shoes)

 

(a 26.2 mile run tagged with scenic + riverside)

 

 

We also put out a few recent bug fixes…

  • Fix for the 1st week of the month calendar bug (sorry about that)
  • Fix for km/mi switch when a user is logged out
  • Fix for “Run location sometimes now showing up”
  • Streak now displays correctly in the user profile popup
  • Fix for some Garmin runs which weren’t syncing correctly
  • Show confirmation before unlinking an account that is still importing run details
  • Fix for splits showing up in miles in the Facebook share image when account is set to KM
  • Fix for a rare issue importing some FIT files

 

 

3 new ways to share your runs

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We’ve improved sharing on Smashrun! Now you can choose between three different images to share on Facebook or Twitter, and highlight the information that matters most for that run.

Sharing Modal

Runs with GPS

Take advantage of the Smashrun Pro map and share a more detailed visualization of your running route. Choose to display your pace graph, elevation profile, or HR data depending on the type of run.

For example, intervals tend to look better when visualized by pace.

Run with GPS

Whereas, trail runs are often better viewed with an elevation profile.

Run with Elevation

Footpod runs

Similar to our original format for shared runs, activities that only contain pace data and lack GPS can be shared as pace graphs including the HR, if available. You can also choose to share GPS runs this way, if you don’t want to publicly post your map.

Footpod run

Manual entries or treadmill runs

And if you happened to run indoors or don’t want to share your route/pace graph, due to bad GPS, you can also share a watch face with two data fields including the run’s notables. And if there are more than 5 notables, we’ll take the top 5 🙂

Manual run or treadmill

Your privacy settings will still apply to how you share your runs. And you can share the same run in different ways depending on what you want to post on Facebook or Twitter. Currently, the Facebook sharing option will now also allow you to post a run to a group instead of just your timeline. Win!

FB share options

From the share modal, you can also control how you want to be prompted to share your runs. You can choose to be prompted after each new run, after only particularly good runs, or to never be prompted at all.

When to share

Regardless of which option you choose you can always manually share a run by clicking on the share icon from your “By run” or “Run list” page.

Share run to Twitter or Facebook

Share run to Facebook or Twitter

Questions about sharing? Leave us a comment or send us an email at hi@smashrun.com.

Now go share some great runs!

Mobile updates for social

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This week, we released some changes to Social making it easier for you to interact with your friends and followers, view your notifications, and add or invite your friends on mobile!

We decided to disable the Explore view on mobile for now, but we are working on releasing a modified mobile-friendly version. Additionally, if you need to update your Social privacy settings, you can do it by clicking the menu on the top-right, then choose “Privacy Settings”. Remember that you’ll need to select one of four social configuration options in order to use or disable Social.

You’ll find the Social and Notification buttons at the bottom of the Overview pages.

Once you load Social, you can switch activity feeds by clicking on the top left icon for the current view. You can also click on user profile photos to load their bio and quick stats.

To view different time periods when comparing Quick Stats or Trends, just click any of the Trailing Sum options.

As always, if you have any questions or if you happen to come across any issues, please don’t hesitate to email us at hi@smashrun.com 🙂

Using social to find similar runners

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Smashrun’s social features are designed to enable you to find similar runners. Whether you’re looking for runners within your demographic or runners who follow a similar training pattern, there are several ways you can compare your training to other runners on Smashrun.

This is useful for a couple reasons:

  • You can follow runners who are on a similar training cycle.
  • You can benchmark your best times against runners within your demographic.
  • You can connect with runners based on mutual goals or affinity (like being socially motivated!)

Make the most of Social

Load Similar Runners to discover runners who overlap with you in terms of pace and training volume, regardless of demographic. Similarity is calculated based on training history over the past year. As a result, your similar runners may change because everyone has different training cycles and train for different events.

You can learn about a particular runner by clicking on their username, which loads their Quick Stats; this is why it’s nice to have a runner bio!

Quick Stats lets you compare your Average Distance Per Week, Average Speed, Longest Run, etc. over the trailing 7-days, 30-days, 90-days, and 1-year. You can visit that runner’s profile by clicking their name, or by clicking the link to the their latest run or last race.

Switch the trailing sum period to see how your training comparison has changed over the past year.

If you’re a Smashrun Pro user, you can also compare your Trends. The Trends view plots historical changes in weekly distance, running frequency, and speed over time. It provides better context when comparing your training to someone else’s as opposed to focusing on individual metrics in a given period, because it’s easier to tell when someone is building a base, running more frequently, or doing more speedwork.

Get a quick glance analysis of someone’s overall training.

Within Similar Runners, you can also switch to the Explore view. Explore compares you to all runners within a certain group. So, if you’re viewing Similar Runners, then click Explore, it plots you and similar runners on a graph that compares your fastest run of a certain distance over your average distance per week in a given period.

See how closely you’re performing to runners training similarly.

The Explore view is an easy way of seeing who’s running the most and who’s capable of running a certain distance faster than a given pace. It might also give you some insight into how someone might have accomplished their fastest 10k. All you need to do is click on a user to see how their training compares based on their Quick Stats!

Remember that, since social features are disabled by default, the only people who are visible within Social are those who have opted in and are not private. This is important to keep in mind, because it’s possible that we might not initially find any runners who are similar to you, until more users start using social.

In the next couple of days, we’ll put together a knowledge base for everything related to social (woo!) and we’ll post a link on the blog once it’s ready.

Now go invite some friends and create your own personal social feed… or get to know some socially motivated runners! 🙂