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- Plug your Garmin device into your computer.
- Navigate to the Garmin drive on your computer and find the folder labeled “Garmin”. If you have a Garmin 800, inside the Garmin folder is a subfolder labeled “NewFiles”. If you have a Garmin Edge 705 or 605, the subfolder will be labeled “GPX”.
- Simply drop your downloaded GPX file into this folder and then safely disconnect your Garmin as you would any other USB device. (The method used to get the downloaded GPX file on your Garmin device will vary based on your computer setup, but in general, you can think of your Garmin as you would any other USB drive.)
- X-Features are a little rough around the edges.
An X-Feature is a lot like the new guy in your cycle club. He’s wearing a different kit and still has a visor on his helmet. But you know that it’s only a matter of time before someone tears that visor off, gets him in a club kit, and makes the world right again. X-Features need a little more development, testing, and design love before we decide to graduate it to a full fledged feature. - X-Features are unsupported.
No support vehicle, soigneurs, or energy bars at mile 13. X-Features are experimental and haven’t gone through the same product and development process as our other features. Please don’t contact the Support team if you experience problems. On the Settings page, you’ll see a link to give feedback to the respective X-Feature. - X-Features are web-only right now.
Our team works on X-Features for our mobile apps too. Getting them into your hands isn’t as straightforward as on the web, however, so for now X-Features are web-only. We expect to have a release path for mobile X-Features in the near future. - X-Features may one day grow up to become real Strava features.
X-Features aren’t meant to stay that way forever. They give us a way to share our ideas with you faster, but we may decide to graduate an X-Feature to a become a full-fledged free or Premium only feature, or we may decide to retire the functionality altogether. X-Features may come and go, but Strava is forever! - Interesting – activities that have a achieved a certain distance, elevation, a certain number of achievements, or a lot of social activity include a map and a little more detail.
- Group activities – I think this is the coolest part of the new Feed. Group activities receive a wide-format map treatment and show all participants in the group activity together.
- Less-noteworthy – activities that are very short, like commutes, take up less space and have no thumbnail map.
New Premium Feature: Weekly Progress Goals
December 13th, 2012
This first iteration of Progress Goals allows you to work towards your milestones week to week. Available on your dashboard, use the drop-down menu next to “Weekly Progress” to select a Running Only, Cycling Only, or both a Running & Cycling goal. Goals start on Mondays, end on Sunday, and can be edited at any time.
Manually uploaded runs and rides will also count towards your weekly goal, but activities uploaded as “Stationary Trainer” or “Treadmill” currently do not. This functionality is coming soon. Free users will not have goal setting capabilities, but will now be able to see accumulated distance totals by sport on their dashboard.
This release marks the first of many for goals-related features. In the future, we plan to introduce longer-term and performance-based goals, as well as more in depth analyses of your progress against the goals you’ve set for yourself. Stay tuned!
If you aren’t already a Premium member and are ready to work towards a new goal in the New Year, upgrade for only $6 per month or $59 per year. Dig deep and get it done!
New Premium Feature: GPX Download Functionality
December 6th, 2012Premium members, discover great routes on Strava.com and download them to your Garmin.
If you have a Garmin 800, 605, or 705, getting a GPX file on your device is easy. On any activity page you’re viewing, you’ll now see a “GPX Download” button located at the top-right corner of the activity’s map. Click this button to download the GPX file to your computer.
Now when you turn on your Garmin Edge device, you should find the route under the “Courses” menu and you’re ready to go.
GPX files are tied to each athlete’s Privacy settings, therefore all activities available for export are stripped of any performance data upon download and respect Privacy Zones except if you’re downloading your own file. If you have Enhanced Privacy turned on, only those who you’ve approved as followers will be able to download your activities. If you don’t want anyone downloading a particular activity, we recommend you make that activity private.
If you aren’t already a Premium club member and want to check out some great new routes in 2013, upgrade for only $6 per month or $59 per year. Enjoy!
New Premium Feature: Suffer Score, Now with Custom Heart Rate Zones
December 5th, 2012Premium members, get the most out of your heart rate monitor and train more intelligently! Now you can set your custom heart rate zones to quantify your suffering, monitor your training load, and dial into your workouts.
Set your custom zones by visiting the My Performance tab in Settings. Click on the Heart Rate Zone editor and select “Custom Heart Rate Zones”. Then, use the sliders to adjust the values between each of your training zones, click “Save” and you’re done.
Why use Custom Heart Zones? For one, your Suffer Score is at its most accurate when you use custom heart rate data. Within each training zone, subtle physiological effects take place to enhance your fitness, and thus the ability to monitor your intensity levels is critical to effective training. Whether you’re looking for energy efficiency on a recovery run, or red lining it up a climb, track your conditioning and your Suffer Score to help you hit that next goal.
If you are unsure about your personal training zones, we recommend a cardio assessment, otherwise there are tools, like target heart rate calculators, that have been developed to help athletes identify their personal heart rate training zones without that level of testing. The key is to experiment a little, and find the zones right for you.
If you aren’t already a Premium club member and want to get the most out of your workouts in 2013, upgrade for only $6 per month or $59 per year. Enjoy!
Strava X-Features Released Into the Wild
November 27th, 2012
Innovation and experimentation are incredibly important to the Strava Team, so much so that we spend two full days each month working on our own projects and investigating new ideas. We call this coveted time a Strava Jam.
The output of a Strava Jam could be anything from a t-shirt or infographic design to a mobile or web feature. Sometimes we make smaller improvements to existing features and functionality, while other times we embrace big ideas that require more planning and testing before they’re ready for prime time. In either case, the experiments that emerge with the most potential and added value to the Strava experience are crowned X-Features.
With all that said, the entire Strava Team is excited to announce that X-Features are available to all users starting today. These experimental features are accessible from your Settings page and available for you to turn on and off, try out, and provide your feedback as they develop. Some things to keep in mind:
I hope you enjoy using X-Features as much as we have. There’s a lot more to come.
- Sarah
New Activity Feed: Reimagined and Redesigned
October 30th, 2012The new activity feed is here! We are so excited to share it with you.
This new feed has been cooking for a bit – research, concept testing, beta testing, an early roll-out to Premium users – and now we get to unveil it for everyone. We definitely do understand that your first reaction might be, “Nooooooooo! Give me back my old feed.” Change can take a little while to get used to. So use it for a few days, let it sink in, and let us know what you think. We read every word of feedback.
To help you navigate this new world, here’s a summary of what we did and why we did it.
Grouped feed entries by day: feed entries are now grouped by day, making them easier to scan with date headers at the top of the feed.
Organized activities: the biggest change is a new way of displaying different types of activities. To help with scanning the new feed, we’ve bucketed activities into three categories.
Grouped Challenges: when friends join a challenge or reach a particular challenge milestone, you’ll see all of those entries grouped together instead of similar/duplicate entries clogging your feed.
Kudos, Comments, and Achievements: note that you can click the Kudos, Comments, or Achievement icons in feed entries to pop open a dialog with more information about who gave kudos, all of the achievements for that activity, and more.
More views of the Feed: as with the old feed, you can view your followers’ activities or just your activities in the new feed, but we’ve also added the ability to view the activities of individual clubs of which you’re a member. Just click the drop-down menu at the top of the Feed to choose your view.
There’s a lot more work planned for the Activity Feed in the future: more ways of organizing information and new Dashboard widgets, as well as making the feed smarter and faster.
As always, let us know what you think! Try it out and share your feedback here.
-Sarah