With a tap on a watch, an activity precisely recorded, and an instant upload, any athlete can receive immediate validation: the kudos begin rolling in. On the popular fitness app, Strava, each kudo is another burst of encouragement from friends and followers, in lieu of likes.
Co-founders Mark Gainey ’90 and Michael Horvath ’88 aimed to create a positive place where users could share workouts with a team-like community. And for the past 15 years, Strava has remained just that—a place free of “vitriol” and other negativity that plagues many social media platforms. “Strava was really born out of that necessity of, ‘Can we create a situation where, by supporting one another, we can stay active?’” said Gainey. In the unique social network, users share physical activities with their followers, who can interact by giving kudos and leaving comments. Athletes can analyze workouts by viewing maps, speed, and other data.
The necessity of Strava’s team-like network started long before the app’s launch in 2009, and before any user taps “Record” on the screen or presses “Go” on a watch. It dates back to transformative bonds created in Newell Boathouse.
“There’s just nothing better than being on a college sports team,” exclaimed Gainey in an interview with the Independent. He came to Harvard as a recruited track and cross-country runner. Sophomore year, he discovered crew and began rowing for coach Charley Butt, who will enter his 40th season with Harvard this year. “In all deference to the amazing academic programs that are Harvard, my life lessons came from that boathouse,” he said.
Gainey fondly recalled the “camaraderie and the esprit de corps and sometimes the trash talking…even just the daily grind.” Throughout his years on the crew team, his committed lifestyle helped other facets of his life, too. “My grades were at their best when we were in the thick of racing season,” he said. “Somehow, when I was most focused on the sports, everything else kind of fell into place.”
The only problem Gainey had with the crew program at Harvard was that his time rowing for the Crimson had to come to an end. “We graduated and poof, the whole thing disappeared,” he said. The creation of Strava’s virtual community was due to its founders’ journey to restore the motivational environment they left behind years before.
After graduating cum laude with a degree in General Studies, having studied fine arts, Gainey moved to California and began working for an investment firm in 1991. “They love to hire athletes,” he said. He was told that he would enjoy the competitiveness of the job because it would remind him of his days on the crew team. Compared to the crew team, this job “was not the kind of compelling, competitive, thing that got me up in the morning and made me tick,” said Gainey.
By 1995, Gainey and Horvath, who had met on the crew team at Harvard, had developed a business plan similar to what Strava has become today. Their idea was to use the internet to create a “virtual locker room” to bring together the friends who had dispersed after graduation. A place “where we could share our workouts, our competitions, and our races and keep supporting each other,” according to Gainey. “That’s what we learned, that having teammates was so critical.”
In 1995, however, syncing sports watches to computers was not mainstream, nor was the concept of social media. “We had to let the Internet mature.” In 2008, Gainey and Horvath revisited their original idea. The “persistence and patience” the co-founders demonstrated in developing Strava was similar to what they learned as rowers at Harvard. “For all the glories that people hear about startups, frankly, they’re a grind…and it’s kind of like being an athlete. You just have to learn how to go through those dark days,” Gainey said.
Although Gainey’s team experience and hard-learned lessons came from his varsity crew roots, Strava was originally designed for cyclists. “We used to target something called a M.A.M.I.L…middle-aged man in lycra,” he joked. “They had Garmin devices on their handlebars. They were obsessed by data.” For an app like Strava, where users log and share this information, the “M.A.M.I.L” was the perfect target market. Now, Strava can be used to track and share nearly 50 different types of activities. As of Jan. 2024, Strava had over 120 million users in more than 190 countries, adding around two million athletes each month. “It’s a global community,” said Gainey.
While Strava has become millions of peoples’ go-to place to support others and engage with workout statistics, its co-founder kept a paper and pencil logbook while training in college, though this was hard to maintain. “There was no storing [data], there was no putting it up on a website,” Gainey explained. “There was no website, there was no internet.” But, he remembers that his coach, Butt, “was always ahead of the curve and using technology.” Now, largely thanks to Gainey and Horvath’s time on Harvard Crew, there is Strava for the rest of us to use.
Of the platform’s many users, there are “amazing pros that you can follow and be inspired by,” according to Gainey. These professional athletes, he said, include Olympic gold medal cyclist Kristen Faulkner ’16, who also rowed lightweight at Harvard. Gainey reiterated that Strava is not just an app for varsity or professional athletes. Users can share two-mile dog walks or their statistics during training for their first 5k. “That’s great because that’s celebrating what it is to live an active life—and that’s the vast majority of folks on Strava.”
Today, athletes and students at Harvard and beyond can instantly share their activities on Strava and receive kudos from their followers seconds later. However, it’s important to appreciate the real-life bonds while they are still close to us. “Enjoy these next few years that you’ve got on the team,” Gainey said.“It goes fast, but you will be amazed at what you carry forward.”
Clara Lake ’27 (claralake@college.harvard.edu) has had her best social media interactions on Strava.