If you have ever gotten on Strava and looked for your “Personal Best” in the profile section, you may want to check out Strafforts. It is a Strava extension that syncs up to your data using the Strava API, once you give it permission, and provides significantly more data and display around your personal best and personal records. By default Strava will only give you the top one effort in each distance, and anything beyond that must be manually found. Strafforts by comparison enables full analysis of each individual chart so you can easily view your top 10 best efforts at any distance, compare trends over the years, and really dive into the details.
For stats geeks and anyone motivated by running, cycling, or other sport personal bests, it Strafforts is worth a look. The app itself is designed for running efforts, so it makes a good complementary offering to Toolbox which is designed for Cyclist (see our Toolbox for Strava Review).
Runners make a big deal out of personal bests. Unfortunately Strava sometimes has glitches in GPS that will cause top efforts to get out of whack. This is easy to catch on common distances like a 5kk that you may know your PB or PR by heart. However for some of the less common distances especially shorter ones the analysis also lets you see where there might be a data error that should be fixed. Personally I was able to find a workout that included an absolutely blistering 2:32 seconds uphill 800 at the start of a 6 mile run. While I wish at times that my warmup was at that sort of elite level it was in fact an error.
By trimming the workout to exclude the faulty GPS data I was able to cut out an old PR and realized that I actually did get faster in that distance later. During a hard training effort more than a year after the faulty effort, I began running regular repeats that were at my real PR. This new found data gave me motivation to keep working! Without Strafforts this glitch would have been something that I overlooked and the added motivation was certainly worth the couple minutes it took to sync and check the data.
View the Progression of a PR with Strafforts
One of my biggest annoyances with using Strava personal records was I had to manually remember what my last one was. Occasionally I would pick up a new one, or have an outstanding race and think “hey that must be at least my second fastest” and have no way to check it. With Strafforts this is a non-issue as it can output the actual progression of a PR. As you extend the amount of time used on the platform this gets to be evening more intriguing.
Running a personal best is hard, and doing so over and over again is even more difficult. That said, if you are a new runner or cyclist and going from a Couch to 5k all the way up to a Marathon over the course of a few years, the progression chart could be an amazing display of dedication over time. Few other apps that we have seen show this as a default setting, while it seems to be one of the marquee options for Strafforts.
Thankfully two of the more common distances (10 kilometer and 5 kilometer) are included in this for the free version. To get the marathon or more distances (including the ultra marathon entry 50k) you will need a pro version of Strafforts.