The Smashrun ranks have always lumped everyone together. Grandmothers are comparing their 5k times to college track stars. It’s pretty discouraging.  So, starting soon, we’re going to calculate individual ranks for distance, discipline, and speed across different brackets. We could have implemented the familiar age and gender related delineations, but in case you haven’t noticed, we like to do things a bit differently.

In a perfect world, brackets would match your peer groups. Who do you really compare yourself to? It might be your fellow ultra-trail runners, or it could be other people working on losing their winter beer belly, or other women who just had their first child. Lines like those are hard to draw, so we need your help.  When you visit the ranks page, you’ll be able to vote for an existing demographic or create your own, and see who joins. After a few weeks, after the dust settles, we’ll take the top 10-20, and make them permanent.

There’s a few things you’ll want to keep in mind.

First, I know it might seem like a site as incredible as Smashrun must have a gazillion users, but there’s actually not all that many of us (I know, I know, we’re shocked too). So you’ve got to be thoughtful about your suggestions. It would be awesome to create a group for 2nd year law students in Guatemala, but you’ll have to get at least 100 people on board for us to be able to build rank.

Second, you’ve got to remember this is a vote. If there’s not enough people we can’t build a useful rank. With just a few people you’ll get bumped around too much by other people’s changes in activity. So, when you choose a demographic you’ve got to choose one you think other people will choose too. And remember to see if the rank you want already exists before you create a new one.

Lastly, I know it’d be incredible if we could simultaneously rank you across many different demographics, but I’ll be honest with you – that’s really, really hard, and we’re not that smart. You’ve got to pick your best demographic, the one that really sums up how you’re different than the average runner.

It’s one giant experiment. We have absolutely no idea how it’s going to turn out. Maybe we’ll end up with cross-dressing zookeepers, as a demographic rank. It really does slow you down when you step in elephant poo in heels, so it could make sense…

UPDATE 

We’re currently experiencing issues getting pauses from Garmin sync, It’s likely they will likely resolve it on their end in the next few days. In the meantime if you experience the issue, it can be resolved by importing the TCX file which will register the pauses correctly. Apologies for the inconvenience.

The Microsoft Band 2 is packed with 11 sensors including a barometric altimeter (whoop!), accelerometer, optical HR sensor (bit delayed) , gyrometer, GPS (fast syncing), skin temperature sensor, UV sensor, ambient light sensor, capacitative sensor, microphone, and a galvanic skin response sensor. Its GPS quality rivals the top dedicated running watches (although sampling rate is a bit low), and it’s got 24/7 heart rate monitoring, all in all it’s a pretty slick device to track your running.

So we integrated it with Smashrun!

Set up is super easy.

While logged in, go to the Synced Devices page > scroll down to Microsoft Health and click ‘Connect’. It will prompt you to authenticate with your Microsoft account and you’re all set. At present we’re just pulling in running data, but we’ll see how demand is and may consider making use of some of the other data down the line.

Feel free to reach out to us at hi@smashrun.com if you have any questions or problems!

As of today, there’s now 35 more badges that you can earn on Smashrun! Here’s what you need to know.

The Smashrun Pro badge series are the first badges where you can choose which runs count towards them. Basically, you can choose to earn them based on your registration date (that means we calculate the badges retroactively so you might earn a lot of them immediately) or based on the day you unlock them (such as from today onwards).

Some badges – like the travel series – are harder to earn if you’re starting from today, so you may be tempted to calculate your new badges based on the date you registered. But if, like many other Smashrunners, you have a long and multifaceted training history, you might find that you’ll earn at least half of all the new badges if you set the calculation to your registration date.

Either way – it’s up to you. And, if you change your mind, you can switch your badge calculation date for the Pro series on your profile settings. Below are the details on the new badge series!

Explore the World

For runners who often go on “destination runs” or have the willpower to run while on vacation, there’s now a set of badges for travelers. Think of them as a good excuse to run in a new city, or just extra motivation to bring your running shoes the next time you schedule a trip abroad.

Astronomical Phases

There are early birds and there are night owls. Then there are those who like to schedule their running around sunrise and sunset. We like to think that there’s something a little special about running during certain astronomical phases, so we created the sunrise, sunset, full moon, and solstice badges. You can even start with the Winter Solstice, which is coming right up!

Further to Farther

Some of these badges can be as challenging or as easy as you’d like it to be. The thought behind it is pretty simple – run a longer longest distance each month. That means it’s up to you. You can even tailor it to a training plan you’ve got in mind. Or you can use it as motivation to build up for your next event.

Pace Variability

Pacing, as a strategy, is one of the most successful ways to set personal bests. The pros swear by it. There’s empirical evidence to back it. And, honestly, it just makes a lot of sense. So, consider these as training badges towards your next several personal bests!

Alternating Days

We did the streaks, extended the streaks, and went as far as challenging runners to do a Leap Year Sweep! (By the way, 2016 is a Leap Year, if you want in on that badge.) This time, we’re rewarding runners who have a different kind of stick-to-it-ness. When you’re trying to break out of a rut, you need consistency. And running every other day is not a bad place to start.

Elevation Gained

You can now earn an Everest badge! And you don’t even have to earn it in one single run. You get a whole month to stack up your elevation gains. If you’re not much of a hill runner – time to shake things up!

Great Ascents

These are harder than the elevation series. You have to earn each badge in one run. Just think of how awesome your legs and glutes will look after ascending the tallest man made structure in the world sans elevator.

Whew! Hopefully, these badges can keep you motivated during the dreadmill months!

UPDATE

Gareth Beavis is going to attempt to earn every single Smashrun badge in 2016. He’s tilting at windmills, foolhardy at best and totally insane at worst, but I can’t wait to read about his attempt in his regular column on TechRadar.

Last night, in preparation for next week’s release, we added two new tags within the By Run page that allows you to exclude bad elevation and/or HR data from any runs. So, in the event that you lose GPS, find yourself with spiky elevation or HR, you can just click on the “Bad Elevation” or “Bad HR” tag and we’ll remove it!

You can use the tags for personal reference (e.g. they won’t recalculate anything) or you can use the tags to actually remove the data from any calculations or visualizations where they apply.

For Smashrun Pro users, you will be prompted if you’d like to exclude elevation data from the Overview pages, the Pro Map, the Change in pace over route chart, and your Training Bands. If you click “no”, the elevation data isn’t actually excluded – it just highlights the tag.

For HR data, both Pro and non-Pro users can click on “Bad HR” to exclude HR data from a particular run. That means it will no longer show up on your pace chart. If you’re using Smashrun Pro, we’ll also exclude HR from the Pro Map and your Training Bands.

Note: if you’ve ever run with a friend and you’ve had to use their data because your watch died or your app flaked in the middle of the run, you can also use the bad HR tag to remove their HR in case they happened to track it.

And, if you mistakenly apply either tag, you can undo it by deselecting the tag(s).

We hope you find them useful!

• For Smashrun Pro users, when you double-click a highlighted segment on the pace chart, it now auto-zooms into that segment within the Pro Map
• We now detect “walks” and “run/walks” and have adjusted the way cadence is displayed for them in the Pro Map
• “Walks” will have the “fastest similar walks” instead of “fastest runs of a similar distance” displayed in By Run
• Duration is now displayed on the List page

As always, if you notice anything out of the ordinary, let us know by emailing us at hi@smashrun.com.

Windows Phone users can now use Caledos Runner to track runs and auto-send it to Smashrun! Caledos is a free app that supports SensorCore technology and Bluetooth SMART devices. It has built-in audio cues in 9 languages and just recently released live tracking. Setup is super easy, it’s free, and you can even run with it “offline”.

To set it up, load Caledos Runner on your Windows Phone, then:

– go to settings > Share

– select Smashrun > authenticate

– enabling sharing

After each run, when you click save, you’ll be prompted to share your run to Smashrun!

Make sure you give it a go if you’re on the lookout for a Windows Phone running app! The developers are also pretty cool and they are quite keen to hear from their users. Just check out their ongoing collection of postcards from runners all over the world.

When Mapbox released their Run, Hike, Bike map, we thought it would be a step closer towards better route discovery. Yet, we found that it didn’t really do a good job of highlighting the information that runners might care about most.

At our default zoom level when displaying your run, you don’t really see much. And the streets, regardless of whether or not it’s a main thoroughfare or a motorway, are virtually indistinguishable.

This is okay for a minimalist map, but we wanted it to be better. So we switched over to Mapbox’s Outdoors map, which includes the same elevation detail, but with greater landcover data so it’s easier to discover trails, hikes, or footpaths that are off the beaten track.

Then we modified it to de-emphasize anything that runners don’t really care about such as:

• miscellaneous points of interest including shops, hospitals, universities, etc.
• colorful building outlines
• green areas that you can’t actually go to (like areas of tourist attractions)

Afterwards, we differentiated the main roads and motorways from streets and highlighted any footways, paths, designated hikes, and trails (they’re all some shade of dotted green line) – basically, any place where you can probably run, you’ll be able to find it. Bike paths are shown as red dotted lines for anyone who wants to avoid them (or for the duathletes among us).

We toned down the colors (a lot), adjusted the level of detail per zoom level, included some additional basic points of interest like tramways, and railways – if you really zoom in, you’ll find the cafe’s (for the early birds) and bars (for the night owls). And now we’ve got a slightly better map for planning runs and viewing them as well!

Of course, all of this data is entirely based on Open Streetmap (OSM), which is open sourced. So, if you see something missing or incorrect, you can just create an account/login on OSM and sort it out!