One of the most covered topics this week in sports-tech news – Strava rolling out changes to their free and subscriber services. There was a lot of creative media headlines around the changes. It took FOUR DAYS for the announced changes to roll-out at which time I spent a number of hours getting hands-on with what really had changed for the ‘Free Strava’ experience.

Summary Strava Free:

– Unlimited uploads / activities.
– Upload direct (Strava Apps) or via a 3rd party linked service (Zwift, TrainerRoad, Peloton, etc)
– Training Summary (Weekly/Monthly/Yearly Totals)
– Dashboard is still the same. (Activity Feed, Kudos, Commenting, Posts, Photos, – The social experience).
– Activity Analysis (Distance, Time, HR, Power, etc. + point and click drill-down).
– Segments still exist. (THEY ARE NOT PAYWALLED)
– You can see Segment details (distance, elevation, map, etc).
– You’ll still set Segment PR/CR/QOM/KOM if you’re fast enough.
– You can see your PR and your current activity segment time/stats.
– You can perform an effort comparison against your segment PR and QOM/KOM.
– You can create Segments.
– You can’t see anything more than Top 10 Overall and Top 10 Women segment times.
– You can’t see all of your previous Segment times/attempts.
– You can’t set Goals.
– NO access to Training Analysis (Power Curve, Freshness/Fitness, etc).
– Flybys (full functionality)
– Clubs (full functionality)
– Monthly Challenges (full functionality)
– Routes: This is a tricky one. NO direct access to the new Route Builder.
   – – You can’t create a route from scratch.
   – – You can’t modify/edit existing route paths. (Edit: Name, Description, Type, Privacy.)
   – – You can copy existing Strava routes. You can create routes from any activity (yours or someone else’s). You can also import GPX via Strava Labs (for now). Routes will still sync to 3rd parties (Garmin Connect Courses API, head units etc).