The Strava Tax Explained

What is the Strava Tax?

Has this ever happened to you? You go for a run, you record 10k. On your watch, you see 10.00.

You're happy with that? So you hit save, you sync it to Strava,

and you see 9.99.

This is affectionately called the Strava Tax by some people and called what the f you

by others. It's a weird bug, seemingly, where Strava will show you a slightly lower number to what you saw on your watch. Your watch is selling you the pipe dream, but what Strava delivers is the crackpipe. So why does this happen? There's one big reason why this happens, but there are two smaller reasons which make it harder to change. We're going to go through all of those, starting with the one big reason. I value your time. So we're going to get straight into the big reason for the Strava tax, and the reason you see a lower number on Strava than you saw on your watch. The big reason is infuriatingly simple, and it is just that Strava rounds down. So when Strava gets the distance figure from your watch, it will round it down.

Why does this happen?

This might not make sense at first because your watch shows 10.00. How can it round that down? Well, that's what your watch shows, but it might not be the actual figure that was sent to Strava. For example, your watch might show 10, but the actual distance it sends is 9.997. Strava will then round this down and you see 9.99. We'll get into the reasons Strava does this and why it might be hard to change in a bit. But first, let's dive into the big reasons which make it really hard for Strava to change this. The first big reason that Strava is kind of stuck doing it this way and kind of hints at to why they started doing it in the first place is that Strava is sort of a hub for loads of different devices. Strava has to take inputs from loads of different running watches, from phones, and it has to process all this data and show it in a kind of a uniform way. Therefore, by nature of doing that, it has to have made a decision about how to process this data. The issue comes when different brands display different information to the user than what they actually send to Strava. So some running

watch brands will show to the user 10.00 on their run. However, the actual figure that gets sent to Strava is much more precise and is actually 9.9998 or something. Strava gets this more precise figure and it rounds down to two decimal places, which leaves you at 9.99 and you've paid your Strava tax. The second big reason why Strava kind of has to do it this way is that some watches try to do magic when they calculate your distance. So most running watches track your distance using GPS. And without going into too much detail, how this works is that essentially every 10 or 15 seconds or so, your watch using GPS will take a snapshot of your location. During the run and after, it can join these dots together and you get a nice line and a distance reading which makes you happy.

GPS Issues

Problem is, is that GPS is far from perfect. Some readings can be off by a few meters or so. To try and fix this, different companies have different algorithms and different ways of trying to detect these bad readings and try and smooth them out and polish your run so that you get what it thinks is a more accurate representation of your run and a more accurate distance.

The problem with this is that this polished fixed version is not normally the distance figure that gets sent to Strava. Normally they just send the raw figure to Strava before it was cleaned up. Strava has to take these inputs from loads of different companies.

This means your Garmin Connect can show you the polished figure, but the raw one gets sent to Strava, Strava rounds down and you see a different number again. These are the two big reasons why Strava is kind of stuck doing it this way. So that's it. That is why the Strava tax happens, and that is the two main reasons why it's hard for Strava to change at this point. But why did they decide to do this in the first place? They say that they adopted this principle in the same way you apply to a like a 5k race. If you're doing a 5k race and your watch says 5k, but the finish line is 200 meters away, you're not going to stop. You're going to keep going to the finish line. Hence, they chose to round down to kind of accommodate for that. If you've ever done a marathon, you'll know you never finish at 26.2, you always finish at 26.7.

Conclusion

So Strava applied this principle to how they kind of process their final figures. Whether that's right or wrong, I don't know. But that's just what they say, they how they say they came to that decision. As for why they can't change it at this point,

I think there's two main reasons, and the big one for me that I can see is that Strava does

have to take input from loads of different devices. Um, and it has to process them all and show them all in a uniform way. So it has to make a decision somehow about how to show these figures. So I do get that.

The second reason that they say is that if they were to change this, they would have to change every run on Strava ever. And every segment, every leaderboard would have to change, which they don't think is just not worth doing at this point. That's it. That's the Strava tax explained. Hope you enjoyed. There's not much I can do about it if you didn't, to be honest.