Strava has announced a new off-road interface to support high-growth trail sports. These updates include new trail activity types and an enhanced suite of routing features to help athletes explore off-road. Strava notes that trail sports are growing significantly around the world. In each of the last two years, the number of hikes uploaded to Strava grew by over 100%. Overall, trail sports including mountain biking, hiking and trail running are growing twice as quickly as those on pavement, such as road cycling.
Strava is adding four new trail sports as primary experiences: Trail Run, Gravel Ride, Mountain Bike, and e-Mountain Bike. These new sport classifications join Bike, Run, Hike, Workout, Yoga and others among the nearly 40 activity types supported on Strava for all athletes. Strava is now also offering its subscribers Trail Routes, which highlight popular trail networks and start points. These route recommendations for Strava’s new sports are activity-specific and adjustable based on preference for distance and elevation.
“When you get a trail route from Strava, not only do you get recommendations powered by our community, you also get all the insights you need to make your time exploring as joyful as possible,” said Michael Horvath, CEO and co-founder of Strava. “Know things like how long it will take you, how crowded it might be, and what’s the best route for you before you go – so you can explore with confidence. All powered by the community who have been there before. We have been seeing off-the-charts growth of trail sports over the past several years, outpacing even growth of road running and riding. Our teams are thrilled to be meeting athletes where they are with this release to fuel their joy of exploration.”
Strava is also adding its popular 3-D map style to activity uploads, which will appear in athletes’ activity feeds. The ability to choose a 3-D map for an activity is only available to subscribers, but all athletes on the platform will see the new map style in their feed when it’s used by athletes they follow.
