One of the many great joys of running is that you can do it almost wherever and whenever you like – whether that’s upon the wide pavements of a city centre, along the gravel paths of your favourite park, or among expansive fields, forests or fells in the morning through to the night.
However, not all running routes are – or, more importantly, feel – safe and accessible all year round. As we enter the realms of winter running, the days and pathways get darker, the weather gets harsher, the terrain can get slipperier and, as such, favourite summer routes become less appealing and trickier to navigate.
To help runners plot their running routes with ease and confidence – particularly during the winter months – Strava has now released two new heatmaps to add to its suite of mapping tools: the Night Heatmap and Weekly Heatmap. Available to Strava subscribers, the two new heatmaps offer more advanced route planning options based on the running habits and go-to running locations of other users.
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What do the new Strava heatmaps do?
The Night Heatmap is a useful feature for subscribers who tend to run in the early morning or in the evening, when the days are at their darkest. For any given location, the Night Heatmap highlights where the most activities have been recorded – or where the greatest ‘heat’ is – throughout the day, so runners can use these insights to pinpoint the most popular running routes during their preferred timeframe. For example, runners may find that the most frequented routes during dim autumn evenings are on well-let pavements, while park or riverside locations are more popular choices during daylight hours.
The Weekly Heatmap, meanwhile, shows heat from the past seven days – or, in other words, which routes have been traversed by runners the most in an area over the past week. This feature helps runners to better identify the top places to run in their chosen location at that time, taking into consideration seasonal transitions and the impact that changing conditions or closures may have had on local trails and roads.
Strava’s Night Heatmap and Weekly Heatmap join the existing Personal Heatmap – which shows subscribers, privately, where they as individuals most often log their runs – and the all-encompassing Global Heatmap. The Global Heatmap is available to all Strava users and illustrates the most popular running routes and areas around the world, based on public activity uploads from the Strava community. (It’s worth noting that activities with visibility set to ‘Only You’ or ‘Followers’ are excluded from heatmaps – only activities that can be viewed by ‘Everyone’ contribute, automatically, to Strava heatmap data.)
‘Our global community powers our heatmaps and now we’ve made it easier for our community members to build routes with confidence, regardless of the season or time of day,’ said Matt Salazar, Strava’s Chief Product Officer. ‘We are continually improving our mapping technology to make human-powered movement easier for all skill levels.’
Want to work out how to access the new heatmaps on Strava? If you’re a subscriber, simply click on the ‘Maps’ tab on the Strava app or website and choose your desired heatmap to view it – or, if you wish, you can opt to view more than one heatmap at once. With these real-world, runner-led insights at your disposal, you can plan your next running outings with a greater sense of assurance as winter takes hold.
