Picture the scene: you’ve just got home from an easy 8k run, and once you’ve unlaced your trainers and grabbed a glass of water, you sit down to upload your workout to Strava. As soon as your run appears, you delete the default ‘Afternoon Run’ title and begin to brainstorm some more specific ideas. Over the next couple of minutes, you oscillate between a variety of angles – reflective, factual, comedic – before settling on the final, curated result: “tired legs club”.

From the braggers to the couldn’t-be-bothereds, Strava is home to a variety of different characters, but none are quite so familiar as the over-explainer. If you’ve never been one, then you’ll likely see them pop up on your feed every so often, using their Strava headlines and descriptions as an opportunity to ‘explain away’ their performance.

These people aren’t bad at running – in fact, many of them are categorically good. But no matter how fast they go or how much distance they cover, they feel the need to offer an explanation for every activity they upload to the app. Some of the best range from complaints about the weather (“ultimate sweat fest”) and technical malfunctions (“headphones died at 6km”) to feeling hungover (“trying not to be sick lol”) and nods to unspecified, historic injuries (“the knee pain is back”).  

Even when said runner has achieved a PB, they’ll still feel the need to bring out the explanations – often describing their performance as a “fluke” or “v unexpected”. No rest for the wicked, eh?

I say all this in the knowledge that I’m guilty of adopting the explainer persona. Scrolling through my past activities on Strava makes me physically cringe, purely because of the elaborate headlines I’ve come up with over the years. Some of my personal favourites (and by favourites, I mean the most gag-inducing) include: “You can always count on running to humble you”; “Parkrun sponsored by #hayfever”; and “Humidity 81% *red-faced, hot and sweaty emoji*”.  

While I’ll happily admit that some of those headlines were posted with the aim of justifying genuinely bad performances, not all of them are. Some are, no doubt, the result of me feeling like I’m not as good as other people and wanting my friends to think there’s a reason behind my ‘poor’ performance. 

That’s probably the case for a lot of other people, too: social media makes us feel like we need to show up and be the best, so when we don’t feel up to par with those around us, we feel the urge to make excuses to keep up the illusion. The only problem with Strava is that you can’t put a filter on a run or FaceTune your route – so coming up with a witty, excuse-ridden caption is our next best bet.  

Now, I might be over-intellectualising something that’s not that deep – most of us aren’t professional athletes, and Strava is supposed to be a fun place to share our runs and see what our friends are up to. But I think it’s important to at least think about why we do this and make an effort to own our achievements some of the time. 

There’s nothing wrong with taking the mick out of yourself but doing so all the time can be detrimental to your self-esteem. And that’s not forgetting the fact that it robs you of the chance to give yourself a pat on the back for getting out there week in, week out (which is pretty damn impressive on its own).

At the end of the day, running is a completely individual sport, so comparing your performance to others isn’t going to do anything except from make you feel rubbish. Sometimes, you just need to put your headphones in, lace up your trainers and get out there – and if you can think of a witty Strava headline while you’re at it, then so be it. 

Images: Getty