Co-Producing Endurance: Strava and the Construction of the Professional Endurance Athlete

Legitimacy

Strava produces legitimacy through two primary mechanisms: box checking and proof of work. First, to become a professional, there are several criteria brands ask athletes to fulfill to maintain a contract. One of these is Strava. “You have to be on Strava and Instagram, period,” said Mark, a professional trail runner. “It is absolutely vital to have that presence.” Athletes and agents alike confirmed that utilizing Strava was tantamount to racing, training, and eating, simply another requirement in the athlete’s routine. Except, for some, checking this box is more important than others. Gemma, an athlete agent, who has negotiated more than 100 athlete contracts for professional runners, emphasized that although Strava is important, what brands want above all is audience. Instagram and YouTube, for example, offer greater potential reach for athletes. However, for those without the technical skills to adeptly use those platforms, Strava becomes an even more critical asset.

Strava itself engages in its own form of box-checking to affirm the professionality of endurance athletes through its check-mark system. Professional athletes appear on the platform with a “PRO” label beside their name (Figure 1). ² If an athlete is not a pro, they appear with an orange checkmark—a designation for highly followed athletes—or with no additional markings (Figure 2). This function creates an automatic sense of hierarchy, drawing distinction between the pro and non-pro and conferring a distinct identity on athletes with brand affiliations. It also simply checks a box. It confirms to the athlete and their audience that they are in fact a professional. As such, Strava confers the professional identity to the endurance athlete distinguishes them from amateurs and influencers.

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Figure 1.

Screenshot of public Strava activity by a professional athlete. Username and profile image have been redacted to protect the poster’s identity.

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Figure 2.

Screenshot of public Strava activity by a verified athlete. Username and profile image have been redacted to protect the poster’s identity.

Strava serves an additional legitimating function by providing proof of the endurance athlete’s physical training. This proof of work is necessary to seek recognition from four key parties: brands, sporting bodies, other professional athletes, and fan/amateurs. Brands’ interest in Strava is twofold. First, Strava, like other social media platforms, offers another means of visibility and reach. When an athlete wears their branded kit in images they share or tracks their sponsored shoe with the app’s shoe-tracking function, this improves the athlete as a marketing asset. Second, brands utilize Strava as a barometer to seek out new athletes and ensure contracted athletes maintain their training. While athletes may discuss their training on other platforms—perhaps posting about a run on Instagram—these are seen as deliberately crafted moments that do not demonstrate complete reality. On Strava, however, because athletes post their mileage, pace, heart rate, and elevation, the success of these endeavors is not subjective but substantiated. For brands, Strava posts confirm that contracted athletes are doing their job and offer concrete evidence that aspiring professionals can compete on a “professional” level.

Sporting bodies take a similar interest in Strava as a platform to track athletes’ performance ahead of international events, where they need to identify the country’s best athletes to compete at the highest level. According to Aaron, a professional trail runner and coach, in 2025, the USA Selection Committee for the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships (WMTRC) conducted a “deep dive” into athlete’s Strava presence and training diaries to inform their final choice for who would compete in the prestigious international competition in Canfranc-Pirineos, Spain. Aaron explained: “They wanted to see how much work we’d put in and how much we’d run. It’s a valuable data point for brands and selection committees to keep tabs on our fitness and do competitive analysis.”

While not enthusiastic about the ongoing surveillance, Aaron understood the platform as a way to prove himself worthy enough to compete at the professional level. When he uses Strava, he has evidence—“cold hard facts”—to prove he is good enough. Such proof also serves an important legitimating function among elite athletes, who use Strava strategically to measure their competitors’ fitness against their own. For Josh, a professional triathlete, this is Strava’s greatest benefit. He explained: “I never go on just to give kudos. It’s helpful to go through the data of other elite athletes to understand where their fitness is, or how they ran a certain course years ago.” For professional endurance athletes heading into an important race, a strong Strava presence—proof of their ability to compete at the highest level—is a source of clout. Tracking and displaying those records on Strava ensure that other athletes both know them and fear them.

Because professionals like Josh often have thousands of Strava followers, many who are amateurs, this dynamic extends beyond the professional field. Professionals’ and amateurs’ activities appear together in the same chronological timeline. However, a PRO-labeled athlete’s run is no more prominently displayed than a weekend jogger’s. Unlike Instagram, where legitimacy emerges through algorithmic visibility and engagement metrics, Strava does not amplify professional content. Instead, it confers legitimacy through symbolic marking within a shared data environment. This came through clearly in how Alex, a cyclist, approaches constructing their Strava profile. They explained,

I only put races and epic training on Strava, activities where I got PRs or KOMs/QOMs, so it’s a curated, positive sample . . . I don’t want to be judged for those slow rides because they take away from who I’m supposed to be as a pro.

Here, hierarchy is not produced through differential visibility but inscribed into the platform’s categorical infrastructure. As Alex and other athletes articulated, a professional athlete is supposed to look a certain way on Strava to be regarded as legitimate. This is not about appearing more but appearing strategically with the specific infrastructural modicums that confer professionality.

Authenticity

Strava occupies a distinctive role in the professional athlete’s media toolkit by conferring a unique and lucrative sense of authenticity. Whereas typical social media platform infrastructures, such as Instagram’s, are built around algorithmic amplification, paid placement, and influencer visibility (Leaver et al., 2020), Strava’s default interface centers biometric and geographic data, pushing commercial content to the margins of what athletes can modify themselves—titles, captions, and added media (Figure 3). Athletes will sometimes mention a particular nutrition supplement in their self-descriptions, wear a branded product in a photo, or tag the shoe or bike utilized during the activity. However, as there are no in-app advertisements, brand promotion on Strava is not infrastructural or championed by the platform. Rather, it is imported by athletes themselves. Because Strava, unlike Instagram, does not require athletes to disclose sponsorship status, even visible branded content is not legible as paid promotion—making product placement largely invisible.

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Figure 3.

Screenshot of public Strava activity by a regular user. Username and profile image have been redacted to protect the poster’s identity.

Lena, a professional triathlete, articulated this structural contrast directly: “Strava doesn’t have the same sort of advertising feel that you’ll see on Instagram. That’s why I post everything on there—well, maybe not everything, but pretty close.” As Lena suggests, Strava represents a refuge, where athletic practice appears unmediated by commercial logic. Whereas one cannot scroll through Instagram without encountering a deliberately placed ad or an influencer endorsing a specific brand, Strava’s default architecture creates a user experience, where one can appear to avoid explicitly promotional, commercial content all together. This sense of sanctuary is not only a product of the absence of traditional ads but also of the “realness” embedded in every post. While attempts to create fake accounts have been reported, Strava emphasizes its “realness” and antagonism toward fabricated posts (Cacciola, 2025). Per Strava’s terms of service, every activity uploaded must be performed by a human through human means. Otherwise, it will be removed, and the user will be banned (Strava, 2024). This policy lends a layer of credibility that other platforms cannot provide. For Paul, a professional triathlete and YouTuber, Strava served as an additional asset to confirm the validity of his visual content. “I take graphics from Strava and overlay them on my video,” he explained. “You can say anything to the camera, but numbers give instant meaning. Anyone can say they ran fast and far. Not everyone can prove they ran 50 kilometers at 6-min pace. Those are some powerful numbers.” Because one cannot lie about their biometrics—at least according to Strava’s terms of service—the platform confers an unparalleled level of authenticity in comparison to platforms like Instagram. This sense is confirmed by athletes’ own perceptions, such as Jean, who explained, “I’m injured right now, so I’m not posting on Strava. I can’t fake it. On Instagram, I can keep posting like I’m training. That distinction makes Strava more real.”

However, somewhat paradoxically, the appearance of such unquestionable “realness” makes Strava an even more lucrative asset for brands and athletes. The modern advertising industry is increasingly structured around measuring, constructing, and monetizing authenticity (Hund, 2023). Brands turn to influencers, specifically, as the ideal vessels for advertising on platforms, to tap into the greater sense of intimacy and relatability between the user and the creator and the unique persuasion that arises from those relationships (Abidin, 2015; Conde & Casais, 2023). While many of the athletes I interviewed decried association with influencers, who they deemed “gross” and “icky,” it is impossible to disaggregate them from this position, as their digital labor enacts the same logics of visibility and intimacy that undergird influencer culture.

Strava, however, makes this distinction recognizable. Using the platform’s cultural vernacular, athletes can practice what Abidin (2017) calls calibrated amateurism, crafting an aesthetic that portrays the “rawness” of their performances, despite and because of their professional status. Within the Strava timeline and behind their biometric data, athletes can claim complete authenticity and disavow their obvious influencer labors. And yet, it is this authenticity, calibrated through the endurance athlete’s data and non-influencerness, that makes them such good influencers. In a social media environment, wherein users and consumers increasingly recognize influencers and their inherent commerciality (Giakoumaki, 2025), Strava allows athletes to embody the appearance of organic athletic life while still circulating within the logics of visibility and monetization. Through their engagement with Strava, endurance athletes find greater justification for both their disidentification from influencers, as well as the necessary boundaries around which to distinguish the category of “professional endurance athlete” as a distinct professional identity.

The endurance athlete becomes their legitimate, authentic, and professional self not when they sign a brand contract or earn their “pro card,” but through Strava itself. Endurance sport is made visible through digital media channels that do not merely mediate but actively produce the athlete. Strava’s ubiquity, as both the mechanism of self-tracking and the architecture of recognition, folds its algorithmic and social logics into the very structure of endurance sport. Professionalism emerges through the repeated acts of capturing, posting, and disseminating the athletic self. Although other platforms contribute to this process, Strava’s conferral of datafied legitimacy and authenticity concretizes the professional athlete as distinct from influencers and amateurs. Importantly, this positions athletes both outside of the influencer economy and as, arguably, the most effective influencers for sporting brands, rendering them employable and recognizable “professionals.”

Constructed Performance

Athletes go beyond using Strava as a barometer to measure training or confirm fitness. They internalize Strava’s construction of legitimacy, authenticity, and even the professional category itself in their everyday lives. When asked about race preparation, athletes turned to Strava to substantiate their fitness. When asked about being considered influencers, they pointed to Strava to justify their authenticity. How they see and recognize themselves had become calibrated, in part, by Strava. But, despite Strava’s claim to authenticity, as interrogated in the previous section, Strava offers no exemption from the performative logics that govern Instagram and other social media. On Strava, sharing data is itself a promotional act. While athletes’ digital labor on Strava enacts the same logics of visibility and intimacy that undergird influencer culture, the platform’s biometric infrastructure makes it appear as something else: objective record-keeping.

Deeper conversations revealed that professionals did not accept Strava’s logics at face value. Rather, they actively re-rationalized them through what they choose to post and withhold. As both a professional runner and coach, Charlie had insights into this dynamic:

I don’t just look at my athlete’s training diaries. I also look at their Strava. And a lot of times, I get two completely different things. There’s what they want the public to perceive. That’s on Strava. But what it actually was? That’s only in the personal log. Sometimes, they’re really struggling, but they want people to think something else. That’s what they put on Strava.

Charlie is not simply observing a gap between private experience and public record. He is describing athletes authoring a public self. This is visibility labor dressed in the language of data. As athletes absorbed Strava’s definitions of professionalism, they felt pressure to perform in the ways the platform deemed valid and sharp dissatisfaction when they fell short. Rather than simply capitulate, however, they reworked those pressures, redefining not only what counts as legitimate and authentic but also what it means to claim the “pro” label at all.

Reworking took the form of tactical refusal rather than outright rejection. Athletes attested to taking “Strava breaks,” temporarily deleting the app, or choosing not to upload workouts. They did not seek to escape the platform’s logics but navigate around them selectively. Nola, a professional trail runner who struggles with frequent injuries, plays a constant game with Strava’s privacy functions:

First, I held on to having my Strava public, but then, I realized, it was hurting me to compare my runs with past runs and other athletes. Now, if I want a recovery week or I’ve got a niggle, I always go on private. It takes the pressure off, and I can rest without feeling guilty.

Cara, a professional triathlete, noted that she only posts half her training: “I like having some runs just for me and not having the pressure of everyone analyzing every workout I do.” Despite Strava’s seeming authenticity, Cara kept her most authentic moments offline. Her strongest efforts are visible to brands and digital crowds, but her meandering cycling adventures are reserved for herself alone. Such selective visibility affirms Strava’s notion of legitimacy while simultaneously exposing its limits. The moments that feel most true to her—exploring, lollygagging, laughing through group rides—never appear on the platform. Authenticity, here, is not a record of truth but a curated performance (Banet-Weiser, 2012), a structured script athletes learn to enact, not a quality the platform transparently reveals.

Much of this curation was also a direct response to concrete dangers of using the platform. After someone used Strava’s geolocation tracking to harass her teammate during a bike ride, Brianna always begins her Strava tracking miles away from home. Similarly, Charlie described strangers locating his home through the platform and leaving gifts on his porch. He considered himself “lucky but still concerned” and justified his continued use of Strava as indispensable for professional legitimacy: “The risk that comes with using the platform is like the risk of not getting in a car wreck. You must put your trust in humanity that everything will be okay.” This framing illustrates how Strava functions less like a social platform and more like a utility or a “critical infrastructure” of the endurance sport ecosystem (van Dijck et al., 2019). In athletes’ experiences, Strava is as unavoidable in endurance sports as a car in petroculture (Daggett, 2018). The weight of this dependence, however, falls unevenly. While male athletes tended to treat privacy risks as inescapable trade-offs, women and trans athletes described sustained and often difficult labor to maintain security. Lily, a newly contracted professional trail runner, explained that “as a younger female in this space, sharing my geolocation like that feels uncomfortable and dangerous.” Before uploading any post, she asks herself two questions: “Do I look professional enough here? And, “am I safe?” These questions are not in tension. Because the curated professional and security-conscious self are produced simultaneously through the same act of posting, they become the very same calculation.

Authenticity and legitimacy on Strava are not simply undermined but co-produced by its elite usership. The mechanisms that claim to offer proof of work and facilitate professional box-checking are also the mechanisms through which athletes reshape what counts as legitimate. Workouts may appear precise in isolation, conferred by pace splits, elevation gains, and heart rate data, but the larger picture is strategically manipulated to meet the platform’s expectations. What distinguishes this dynamic from broader accounts of social media performance is the platform’s biometric infrastructure. Its data architecture claims to produce an objective, verifiable record of the body in motion, yet athletes consistently intervene in that record through selective uploading, privacy toggling, and strategic withholding. The presence they construct is legible to brands, fans, and governing bodies not because it is transparent but because athletes have learned to work within and against the platform’s evidentiary logic—the same logic that allows Strava to present itself as categorically different from Instagram while operating through the same structures of visibility, aspiration, and performed self. Strava’s promise of transparency does not make visible the athlete’s unfiltered reality but the ongoing labor through which athletes and the platform together define what it means to be legitimate, authentic, and professional.

Careers and Livelihoods

Traditionally, sports media transform athletes into celebrities, whose names and faces are used as commodities to sell games and products (Lopez, 2023). This commodification, however, is substantially transformed through Strava’s digital architecture, where such endorsements are derived directly from athlete’s biometric data. Nike, for example, no longer uses Michael Jordan’s name or face alone to sell their newest Air Jordan shoes. They also use Lily, Charlie, and Cara’s distance, pace, and energy expenditure—as captured on Strava—to sell their newest trail shoes. While such emphasis on athlete data over presence is inherently reductive, the data athletes produce on Strava also helps to propel their sport forward in ways that go beyond purely increasing commercialization in endurance sports. Namely, their data-driven networks and stories help create viable, fulfilling careers in a lively and relational industry.

When athletes use Strava, their activities create detailed geolocation maps, extensive biometric panels, as well as metadata from general usage, which Strava sells to third parties and government entities. In this exchange, the posts by the athlete, especially when connected visually or textually with branded gear, are rendered into what Nikolas Rose (2008) terms digital biocapital: value derived simultaneously from the digital data economy and the capitalization of the human body. Although this data does not enrich athletes directly, the visibility it provides attracts brands eager to profit from the expanding endurance sports market. “Brands are increasingly curious and interested in what athletes can do for them through Strava,” noted athlete agent Tracy, who touted Strava’s unique blend of intimacy and opportunity for native advertising, with more money flowing into endurance sport. After years of balancing training with full-time or multiple part-time jobs, some athletes now secure contracts that allow them to sustain their careers without external labor. While many still juggle multiple jobs, endurance sport is increasingly imaginable as a viable profession that also supports ancillary careers, such as agents like Tracy. Through the data they generate on Strava and its conversion into branding capital, athletes fuel both industry growth and their own professional survival.

Athletes produce two other key data-latent entities through their Strava usage: stories and socio-technical networks. Importantly, while these connections are recorded and mediated by Strava’s architecture, they are not reducible to data alone. Cedric, a professional trail runner recovering from injury, illustrated how even the most minimal activity becomes narrativized through the platform:

Right now, I’m Strava-ing a 1km crutch not because I need to but because it’s fun, and I can use it to tell a story. I’ve started from ground zero, and so a one-kilometer crutch feels like a victory, and I can share that progress with people.

Here, what would otherwise register as negligible biometric output—1 kilometer—is re-authored as a meaningful narrative of recovery. Strava, in this sense, does not simply record performance but provides the conditions through which athletes transform data into story, situating even diminished capacity within a longer arc of athletic identity. For Bea, a professional trail runner, this is precisely what makes her enjoy the platform: “I use it to keep in contact with that random person I met at a 50k eight years ago and follow their life. Those relationships make this fun.” As Bea suggests, these connections are more than reservoirs of data for brands. They enable networks that co-produce legitimacy and intimacy, constructing professionals as recognizable while pulling amateurs more deeply into the endurance ecosystem, sustaining not just careers but the sport itself.

Through Strava’s self-tracking and sharing, these athletes perform, resist, and argue in ways that constitute personal and collective identity and value. Tess, a professional trail runner, exemplifies this form of sense-making when she regards her Strava usage as an educational resource to empower new athletes:

It’s great that younger athletes can see what we’re actually doing. When you’re preparing for your first hundred-mile race, it can be easy to think you have to go crazy, overtrain, or do huge, long runs. But I don’t do that because I can’t train like that and stay healthy. So, if people can see, I only averaged like 70 miles a week going into this race and ran like that, that’s valuable for all of us.

Strava’s defaults strip Tess’s workout of her human experiences, reducing her bodily experience to what can be expressed through distance, pace, and time. However, Tess understands this data as constitutive and, when contextualized through her additions—an informative title, a detailed caption, and visual media which elaborates on her activity—a connective force that propels endurance sports forward. When athletes choose to weave their narratives into a platform environment that, by default, reduces them to datafied metrics, they create the opportunities for communal growth and livable careers.

Within Strava’s realm of datafication, commodification, and curation, athletes carve out space to insert their stories and sentiments in ways that re-orient and refine Strava’s normative logics. Tess and Bea do not let Strava’s metrics set the precedent. Instead, they contextualize their data to center taking care of yourself and to circulate stories of personal resilience and experience to inform future runners. They use humorous captions, encouraging comments, and attached multi-media—such as visuals of them playing atop snowy mountains—to amend biometric and geographic default. Most importantly, these athletes play within and against Strava’s system to shape what it means to be a professional endurance athlete and ensure their sporting ecosystem is not only financially viable but also safe and enriching. Through this relational and affective work, athletes not only build careers but also articulate their selfhood and re-assert autonomy within the broader endurance sport ecosystem.