Strava wants to own more than your feed and has rolled out a new plan to do so.

The update adds a new Events tab inside Strava’s Groups experience, and for the first time, Runna’s race database lives natively inside the app.

If you’re the type who plans your training block around what’s actually on the calendar, this is the update that’s been missing in Strava. For us, our calendar and training lives in TrainingPeaks and we use Strava for social. Strava wants it all (if you’re using Runna) in one place.

What’s New

• Events tab. A dedicated sub-tab under Groups that surfaces upcoming group runs, rides, and races based on your activity history and location. This is Strava trying to make “find people to move with” as frictionless as “find people to follow.”
• Races hub. Actually cool. Browse and filter upcoming races by distance, date, location, sport, elevation, and even temperature. Runna’s database will give thousands of active global events, making it now searchable without leaving Strava, and it connects directly into custom Runna training plans once you pick a race.
• Club Organizer Hub. A rebuilt home base at strava.com/club-organizers for the volunteers and captains who actually run the clubs Strava depends on, with new resources for building and growing a group from scratch.
• Local Club Events. Get their own filters too which include date, location, format, and distance.

Our Thoughts

Strava wants to keep you locked in to the platform longer and how do they do that? With the Runna acquisition, they’re now selling themselves as a 360 solution. Strava will help you find the race and find the training plan that matches it. Then find the club that keeps you accountable when the plan gets hard.

Like we said, Strava has quietly been buying and building toward exactly this for quite some time. They want to be the operating system for your entire season, and not just the place you upload workouts to and give kudos.

For club organizers specifically, Strava hopes to take some stress off your shoulders. Club leadership has historically been a pain. Sweatpals is an option but we don’t know anyone who uses it. So then it’s mostly a group chat and a spreadsheet, if you’re lucky. This at least helps.

But like anything, you need to get people to convert. Will they do so in mass or keep to their archaic ways? We’ll keep an eye out and look forward to seeing how this works.