Few elite distance runners share more online about their training than Conner Mantz. Which is why it became so noticeable when he went dark last fall.
On Strava, the workout-logging social media platform, Mantz’s thousands of followers were used to regular updates, in extensive detail, of his routes, paces, sauna sessions, and even inner thoughts. After finishing as the top American at the Chicago Marathon last October, Mantz uploaded his race data and added his own 895-word recap.
But a few weeks later, with the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials less than three months away, his posting slowed without explanation. The reason? Mantz got COVID, then suffered a stress reaction in the femur in his right leg, said Ed Eyestone, his coach and the director of track & field at Brigham Young University.
When Mantz resumed training after a two-week break, he had to also figure out how he wanted to resume posting on Strava. He had joined the app to build community, but now he was aware of what everyone would see. Some runs remained public on the app, with others locked as private.
“I went a little dark because I didn’t really want everybody knowing I’m hurt and what I was doing to combat an injury,” Mantz said. “I don’t want anyone to get an advantage knowing I’m hurt and, you know, being that much more motivated.”
His coach saw the tension around Strava playing out for Mantz. “At some point, he realized, ‘Well, this is my livelihood, and maybe I think I should keep a few secrets to myself and not tip my hand so much,’” Eyestone said.
Mantz’s uncharacteristically infrequent inactivity sparked speculation about his fitness on running message boards, and among those reading the theories were his training group—who didn’t exactly mind the air of mystery surrounding him.
“You just kind of go, ‘Well, good, read into that as much as you want to,’” Eyestone said of message-board sleuths. “But Conner Mantz is going to come to play hard on race day.”
When Mantz did, winning February’s Olympic Trials ahead of training partner Clayton Young, his victory was also a reminder that before the world’s elite runners get to the starting line, they must toe a different kind of line: Deciding how much of their training to let the public and potential competitors see. Professionals say there is no right or wrong way—but there are choices, and they often play out on Strava, whose workout-tracking features and deep usage among runners can offer a highly granular view into training.
Some pro distance runners choose clarity, others cat-and-mouse. Some posters are prolific, others are protective. A whole bunch of gray exists in between. The trick is finding what is real on an app, like all social platforms, where users can present a slight distortion of reality, as well as a direct reflection. Several top runners with Olympic aspirations said they operate accounts under different names known to only a few.
Do elites truly follow one another, looking for insights?
“Oh, I think they are,” said Dathan Ritzenhein, coach of the On Athletics Club. “I get it in my ear all the time, you know, from some athletes about what other people do, and whether they get that source through some social media, Strava or something else, some interview, my athletes are very inquisitive.”
Sizing up the competition
Molly Seidel started her Strava account while living in Boston to follow friends and peers in the running community. In the years since, she has earned a pro contract, a bronze medal in the marathon at the Tokyo Olympics—and become a case study of the full spectrum of how pros use Strava. She was once the type of runner who synced her watch to automatically upload every workout; now she is more guarded.
She sees her peers’ usage as falling within four categories, starting with those who post everything, as she used to. Then,“You have the people who don’t show anything, like don’t show, don’t tell,” Seidel said. “The showoffs, who only post the good workouts and nothing else. [Then] you have the people who purposely only post their easy runs and hide the good workouts to keep it secret.”
Those who practice transparency say their motivation comes from building community. They see no competitive disadvantage, saying that Strava reveals only the physical dimension of training, and not important context, such as the athlete’s mental state, how much they’re sleeping, what they’re eating, or the intention behind a workout. They also suggested that pros’ training blocks are so individually tailored that any comparison with a competitor offers little value.
“I could go do what Jakob Ingebrigtsen does, and I’d be broken in two weeks and out for the year,” said Drew Hunter of the Tinman Elite group in Boulder, Colorado. “Him sharing that stuff really doesn’t impact me, and I think there are so many ways to skin the cat, so to speak, and everyone can get better in different ways. So I think, ‘Why not put out what you’re doing?’”
Marco Arop of Canada, the 2023 world champion in the 800 meters, set up his smart watch to post to Strava years ago when he got the watch. He never bothered to change the settings, and to this day, even his warmup jogs at 9-minute mile pace post to the app. Rachel Smith of Northern Arizona Elite in Flagstaff and Hobbs Kessler of Very Nice Track Club in Michigan don’t use Strava at all. They don’t want to commit more energy toward the upkeep of yet another platform.
But like Hunter, both echoed a belief that success ultimately hinges on consistency in training, not trade secrets found in a workout of which others are likely already doing a variation. “One thing won’t make you good,” Kessler said. “[Success] is not missing a day over a decade. There’s no cheating it.”
In popular training hubs like Flagstaff and Boulder, Smith said a high concentration of professionals already overlap “on the track at the same time, sharing data and information.”
Others, however, see a limit to what is shared. “I actually think you can glean things from what people share on Strava,” said Emily Sisson, the American record holder in the marathon. Sisson shares aspects of her training on Instagram, but not on Strava, out of concerns about her training location and not giving away her coach’s workouts.
In the lead-up to the marathon trials, training partners Mantz and Young studied competitors’ training on Strava to determine who to take seriously if they made a move in the race.
“I follow Zach Panning on Strava, and I knew, ‘Okay, Zach’s races have been good, how is his training?’ And following his training on Strava, I can kind of see, ‘Oh, he’s very fit,’” Mantz said. “So I know that if Zach makes a move in the race or if he takes the lead or he pushes the pace, I know that ... it’s not likely he’ll come back.”
That knowledge is not likely to make a significant difference, Mantz added. But, he said, “it can help you be prepared.” Panning made a move to the front five miles into the marathon trials—and Mantz and Young covered it.
A generation raised on social media
Ritzenhein kept a small circle during his own professional career. When he signed up for Strava, it was only to relay readings from his watch to a different workout-tracking platform, Final Surge. Only later did he realize that his Strava activity had been public the whole time. He quickly made it private.
“I always was much more, ‘I like to hunker away, I like to show up with some mystique’ about where my fitness was,” Ritzenhein said. He and Eyestone, a 1988 and 1992 Olympian, are among a group of elite runners who ran at their peak before social media. They have had to learn to coach athletes raised on it.
“You have to be very resilient, believe in what you’re doing a lot, because everybody is an armchair quarterback,” Ritzenhein said. “They have their own opinions with no context into what you’re shooting for, what your lifetime mileage is, what your strength-training routine is. It’s evolved over time and I just think that you have to be a certain type of athlete to be okay with that.”
The coaches leave the decision about what to share on Strava up to the athlete. Mantz and Young have benefited from being open with fans, Eyestone said, though he acknowledged he thought that his workouts were being given away in the process.
As an aspiring coach, Hunter collects different ideas about training from posts by professionals such as On’s Joe Klecker, a close friend.
“He’s one of the best American runners we’ve ever had, and he’s putting everything out there,” Hunter said. “Why would I not want to check out what he’s doing?”
That search for intel and inspiration has existed within running long before smartphones and GPS watches, and it isn’t unique to the sport. Information has long equaled power across all sports, turning sign-stealing accusations into scandals in the NFL and college football, and leading NBA teams to guard lineup and injury information like nuclear codes.
In Eyestone’s competitive era, learning from your competitors took more effort than a few clicks. Before the 1996 U.S. Olympic marathon trials, Eyestone’s search for a way to shake up his training took him to Toluca, Mexico, where he’d persuaded Mexico’s two-time New York City Marathon champion German Silva to let Eyestone spend a few months training at altitude with him.
“Had he had Strava at the time, I would have seen [Silva’s training], but unless I went and joined the group, I wouldn’t have really been able to experience [it],” Eyestone said. “Would I have put that out there that this is what I was doing? Maybe. Maybe if I thought that people would be psyched out by it. Because when I told people about it when I got back [to the U.S.] they were kind of like, ‘Wow, that’s that sounds like some great training.’”
The open books
Keira D’Amato invites others to follow along. Her account started “before I was ‘Keira the Nike pro,’ when I was ‘Keira the mom’ just trying to fit a run into my day,” she said. The full scope of her training, which incorporates strength, recovery and Pilates work, isn’t reflected on Strava, but keeping all of her running activity open for all to see remains authentic to who she is, down to titling every post with a joke.
And if one of her posts after an exceptionally strong workout sows any psychological doubt in a competitor come race day, she also doesn’t mind who is watching. A 15-mile tempo run she posted to Strava in January sparked a discussion thread on LetsRun that grew to three pages. Based partly on what was visible on Strava, she was one of the prerace favorites, although she ended up dropping out at mile 18, undone by the heat.
Within that discussion on D’Amato’s training, one commenter brought up Seidel and suggested she was injured, writing, “See her strava for proof.”
The comment exemplified what Seidel, who indeed withdrew later from the trials because of an injury, described as a feeling of being under constant analysis and criticism, whether on message boards or in her own Strava comments. It has created what she called her current “love-hate relationship [with] Strava.”
Her concern is not marathon competitors tracking her, but over exuberant and uber-critical followers who don’t realize that not every workout is perfect, and that mile splits and paces don’t tell the whole story.
Seidel remembers posting a workout one week before the Tokyo Olympics when she couldn’t break six-minute pace for 400 meters. Anyone following closely would have believed Seidel had no chance. A week after “the worst workout in my life,” she won bronze, becoming the first U.S. woman to medal in the marathon since 2004.
“That’s the truth of it, maybe that’s why I like using Strava,” Seidel said. “I like putting the messy disasters of workouts on there just to show people like, yeah, it’s pretty f------ brutal sometimes.”
Seidel remains on Strava for the original reason she joined—the ease of connection to friends and, yes, fans. The pandemic underscored the mental health benefits of staying connected, said Jessica Bartley, the director of psychological services for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. But she has also heard athletes describe pressure to be active on social media, whether for personal or commercial reasons.
“Are you going to get sponsors through there? Are you building your fan base? I think there’s a bit of a balance, and we often try to work with athletes who want or even feel like they need to be on social media, particularly with the Olympics coming up,” Bartley said.
The approaching Olympics will draw even more scrutiny to what elite runners bound for Paris share—and what Strava sleuths will try to discern from it. Some feel it’s worth it to keep a few trade secrets close to the singlet. Eyestone was asked what might qualify.
“Why would I tell you that now if it was something that I wanted to keep in my back pocket?” he said, chuckling. “So I guess that’s a facetious way of just saying, ‘Yeah, there might be,’ in which case I would just say let’s turn the Strava off today and just leave it, and let them guess.”
Andrew Greif is a Los Angeles-based reporter whose coverage of track and field has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Oregonian and other publications since 2007.
