How Pace It Works with Strava
Strava is where most runners live. It is the largest running community in the world, with over 100 million athletes sharing runs, racing segments and following each other's training. If you run, there is a good chance your data already flows through Strava.
Pace It connects to Strava and adds a layer of analytics that Strava does not provide. It takes the activity data you already record and answers a question Strava was never designed to answer: is your training actually making you faster?
What Strava Does Well
Strava is built around community. The activity feed shows what your friends are running, where they are running and how it went. Kudos, comments and group challenges keep people showing up. Clubs make it easy to connect with runners in your area or your training group.
Segments turn any stretch of road or trail into a leaderboard. Route planning helps you find new places to run. The per-activity analysis gives you splits, a map and a summary of each workout. For tracking what you did today and staying connected to other runners, Strava is hard to beat.
What Strava is not built to do is connect months of data into a longitudinal picture of your fitness. It shows you each run as a standalone event. You can scroll back through your history, but you cannot easily see whether your easy pace at the same heart rate has improved over the last four months or whether your training load is trending in a sustainable direction.
What Pace It Adds
Pace It is an analytics layer for your running data. It takes workouts from Strava (or Apple Health) and builds the kind of longitudinal view that only emerges when you connect months of training together.
The core insight is pace at heart rate over time. Pace It tracks your average pace in each heart rate zone, month by month, and plots the trend. If your Zone 2 pace dropped from 5:30/km in March to 5:18/km by July at the same heart rate, your aerobic fitness improved. That signal is buried in raw data if you try to find it manually. Pace It surfaces it automatically.
Beyond that, Pace It calculates Training Load Ratio (an acute-to-chronic workload indicator that flags when you are building too fast or tapering), a running efficiency scatter that plots every run from the last 90 days by pace and heart rate, and the Pace It Index, a single 0-to-100 fitness score that tracks fitness, efficiency, consistency and volume together.
It also generates personalized training paces from your own data. Not a generic calculator. Seven paces from recovery through sprint, each derived from your actual running over the past 60 days. These update as your fitness changes. You can also explore these kinds of calculations with the free running tools on the Pace It website.
How They Connect
The setup takes about a minute. In Pace It, you connect your Strava account through a standard OAuth flow. Once connected, your Strava activity history syncs into Pace It and new runs arrive automatically as they are uploaded to Strava.
This means any device that records to Strava can feed into Pace It. Garmin, Polar, Suunto, COROS, Apple Watch, or even phone GPS. You do not need to change anything about how you train or record your runs. One connection, and your Strava history flows into Pace It's analytics engine.
Pace It reads your data. It does not write back to Strava. It will never post to your feed, modify your activities or interact with your Strava account in any way beyond reading the workouts you have recorded.
What Changes for the Runner
Nothing changes about how you use Strava. You keep sharing runs, checking segments, interacting with your club and browsing the activity feed. All of that stays exactly the same.
What you gain is a second lens on the same data. Open Pace It when you want to know whether your pace at the same heart rate is improving month over month. Check it when you want to see if your training load is balanced or if you are overreaching. Use it to get personalized training paces that reflect where your fitness actually is right now, not where a generic formula says it should be.
Strava tells you what happened on today's run. Pace It tells you what is happening across your last three months of running. Both are useful. They answer different questions.
A Practical Example
Say you run four times a week and record everything with a Garmin watch that syncs to Strava. You connect Strava to Pace It once, and your full history imports. From that point forward, every run that hits Strava also appears in Pace It within minutes.
After a few weeks you open Pace It's Insights tab and see that your Zone 2 pace has improved by 8 seconds per kilometer since you started your current training block. You also see that your Training Load Ratio is at 1.15, which means you are building load at a sustainable rate. Your personalized easy pace has been updated to reflect your current fitness.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need Strava to use Pace It?
No. Pace It works standalone with Apple Health data from your Apple Watch. But connecting Strava expands device compatibility. Any watch that syncs to Strava (Garmin, Polar, Suunto, COROS) can feed data into Pace It through the Strava connection.
Does Pace It replace Strava?
No. They serve different purposes. Strava is where you share runs, follow friends, compete on segments and join clubs. Pace It is where you track whether your training is producing results over weeks and months. Most runners use both.
What data does Pace It pull from Strava?
Pace It reads activity data: pace, distance, heart rate, duration and route. It uses this to build longitudinal analytics like pace at heart rate over time, Training Load Ratio and personalized training paces.
Does Pace It post to my Strava feed?
No. Pace It only reads data from Strava. It does not write to your Strava account, post activities or modify anything on your feed.
Can I use Pace It with a Garmin watch?
Yes. Connect your Garmin to Strava, then connect Strava to Pace It. Your Garmin runs flow through Strava into Pace It automatically. The same applies to Polar, Suunto, COROS and other watches that sync with Strava.
Pace It is free to download on the App Store.