From the archive: Kudos, leaderboards, QOMs: how fitness app Strava became a religion

档案回顾:赞誉、排行榜、QOM(最快圈速):健身应用Strava如何成为了一种信仰

The Audio Long Read

2026-01-14

32 分钟
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单集简介 ...

We are raiding the Guardian long read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2020: the Strava app offers community, training data and motivation to millions of athletes. Even runners who dislike tech can’t bear to be without it By Rose George. Read by Rhiannon Edwards. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod
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  • This is The Guardian.

  • My name is Rose George.

  • I'm the author of QDOS Leaderboards QOMs.

  • 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's driver 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.