“There really wasn’t much on, ‘Yep, it can do those things, but also how does it make you feel when you do those things?’” she said. “I do think there are many positives of using Strava, but have you balanced that with the potential negatives of using Strava just like any other fitness tracker?”

Russell and colleagues, including Charlie Potts, who studies social media, identified that their targets for analysis were easy to find and were ideal subjects: students who run and, as college students, are frequent social media users at a key point in their identity development.

In their first study, published in Recreational Sports Journal, researchers found that their group of 18 students in running clubs on U.S. campuses recognized that positives and negatives are the reality of Strava use. Some participants said the app promoted community and healthy competition. Others said they were aware its use brought on insecurities as they decided how to present their workouts to followers or when they got into comparisons.

The findings led Russell and her colleagues to study a second group in 2023, this time professional and semipro runners. There were overlaps with the first study’s findings, but researchers found the elite runners thought more critically about their Strava use, perhaps owing to their ages and running experiences.

“A lot of participants saw it as transactional. They wanted to know what their competition was doing,” Russell said. “So they felt like they had to share what they were doing as well.”

Like the recreational runners, they were concerned with how others viewed them, but they did more to control how they were viewed. For example, Russell said, they would hide data they thought was undesirable, such as an elevated heart rate on a “slow” run. Or qualify what they saw as “bad” runs by naming their activity or commenting on their run to indicate they weren’t feeling well or were running with someone else — implying their partner was a slower runner.