This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

My name is Rose George.

I'm the author of Kudos Leaderboards QOM's How Fitness App Strava became a Religion, published in 2020.

I got interested in Strava because I became a runner quite late on in life in my 40s and slowly then became a fell runner and noticed how many of my fell running compatriots and how many runners that I knew were using something called Strava and it became quite an

essential part of the community. And so I started to get interested in the app and how it had

grown and what its influence was. So I spent a year or two looking into it.

So in 2020, Strava was popular, definitely popular. It wasn't the most downloaded fitness app,

but in 2020, Strava had under 100 million downloads. And in its latest yearly report,

which was released a couple of days ago,

it now claims to have 180 million. So that's a huge growth. And its report focused extensively

on Gen Z as well. So it's obviously more targeting younger users, which wasn't as far as I can tell,

wasn't really the case in 2020.

There are different things that have changed.

Running is now the most popular sport on Strava, which started as a cycling app.

Cycling has got a bit less popular.

The younger users, the generation said, they tend to be much more

into weightlifting, which is good. Women are more into weightlifting now. Again, it's quite

hard to find stats about, for example, the gender breakdown on Strava, but it was always

a overwhelmingly male app back in 2020, and I suspect that has improved,

but I suspect there is definitely still not parity, even though a lot more women are getting

into sport, which is great. What else has changed? Strava has still not gone public. So as a business,

...