Importing your Strava history
Strava keeps every session you ever uploaded to it, in the file your watch or phone recorded. You can ask Strava for all of them in one archive, and the tracker reads that archive. One request, one download, one folder to compress, one drop. Count a few hours of waiting for Strava and ten minutes of your own time.
Why the archive
The tracker never connects to Strava, and it skips the sessions that reach intervals.icu through Strava. The archive is another matter: Strava hands it to you, and you drop your own files. With your past sessions in the account, the plan reads your real load of the last year, the performance curves cover whole seasons, and your segments are timed on every outing you ever recorded.
Step 1. Request your archive from Strava
Use the Strava website, not the app. Click your profile picture at the top right, then Settings, then My Account in the left menu. Scroll to the bottom of the page: under Download your account, click Get started. On the page that opens, click Request download. Strava prepares the archive and emails a link to the address of your Strava account; Strava itself says it can take several hours.
Step 2. Download and open it
The link gives a file named export_ followed by a number, ending in .zip. Unzip it: double click on a Mac, right click then Extract all on Windows. Inside:
activities: one file per session. A watch gives.fit.gzfiles; other sources give.tcx.gzor.gpx. This is the only folder the tracker needs.media: your photos and videos. By far the heaviest part.routes: the itineraries you drew. They are not sessions.activities.csvand a few other.csvfiles: lists about your account.
Step 3. Compress the activities folder only
The tracker takes files of 100 MB at most. A whole archive is usually far above that because of the photos; the activities folder alone rarely is. On a Mac, right click the activities folder and choose Compress: you get activities.zip next to it. On Windows, right click it and choose Compress to ZIP file (Send to, then Compressed folder, on older versions). Look at the size. A year of regular training weighs 15 to 25 MB in that folder; a decade of daily sessions, over 200 MB. If activities.zip is above 100 MB, make two or three archives instead: select the first half of the files (their names are numbers that grow with time, so a block of names is a block of time), compress, then the rest. Each archive must stay under 100 MB. You can drop them together.
Step 4. Drop it in the tracker
Log in to the tracker. Drop the archive anywhere on the page, or click Import files at the top right and pick it. The file gets a line: uploading, then analysing with a count of the sessions read, then the plan steps, then ✓ and the number of sessions brought in. The page reloads by itself at the end. Keep the page open while the line says uploading. From analysing on, the work runs on the server: you can close the page and come back later, the sessions will be there. Several archives are sent one after the other; the second waits for the first. A year of sessions takes a few minutes; a decade, an hour or more.
What comes in, and what does not
- Every session, dated on the day it started, in History and in the Performance curves, with its training load, zones, climbs and segments. The weather of each outdoor session is fetched too.
- A session in FIT keeps everything the watch recorded. A session in TCX or GPX keeps time, position, altitude, distance and heart rate; power and cadence are not read, and a GPX session counts its pauses in its duration.
- A session already in your account is skipped. Importing the archive twice, or after intervals.icu already brought the recent months, creates no duplicate. Two recordings of the same outing give one session.
- Photos, routes, descriptions, kudos and comments stay on Strava.
- If you had built a training plan before, open the Training Plan panel once the import is done: under Past year training, click Refresh this value based on history, then Rebuild the season plan. The plan now has a real year to read.
If something does not come through
File too large (max 100 MB). The archive is too big. Split it as in step 3. ✗ Could not read this file. That file is damaged or is not a recording. The others still go through. The line stays on analysing for a long time. That is normal for a long history. You can reload the page: the import carries on on the server, and the sessions appear as they are read. A history too big to split by hand. Write to contact@montagneur.com with the size of your activities folder. The administrator can load it directly.