Exporting — Strava

Export a GPX from Strava, without staying in the social system

Strava keeps every outing in its social catalogue, but lets you export them at any time. Here's how to recover the .gpx of an activity, in under two minutes.

By Web developer & trail runner

3 min read

I.Pulling your tracks out of the social system

Strava keeps every outing in its social catalogue — leaderboards, segments, activity feed, recommendations. The service still lets you export each track as a .gpx, at any time, no strings attached. That's a commendable policy, and it's valuable for anyone wanting to analyse elsewhere.

Several legitimate reasons: archive a track before Strava changes its elevation policy (the « elevation correction » feature replaces the elevation recorded by your watch — useful but not always faithful), share with a non-Strava friend, or analyse a precise portion without creating a public segment.

II.On desktop, in four clicks

  1. Open strava.com in a browser and sign in.
  2. Navigate to the activity to export: either one of yours (from your feed or My profile → Activities), or any public activity from another user. The URL should look like strava.com/activities/[a numeric ID].
  3. In the left-hand column of the activity page, click the « … » icon (three dots).
  4. Select « Export GPX ». On your own activities, you may also see « Export Original »: that second option gives the raw .fit from your watch, the first one gives a .gpx with the elevation Strava displays (corrected if you have that feature enabled).

The file downloads in a few seconds. Useful bonus: from your account settings, you can also request a complete export of all your data (under « My Account → Download or delete your account »). That sends you a .zip archive of every track you've recorded — worth keeping safe.

III.On mobile, via the browser

The Strava mobile app doesn't offer one-tap .gpx export. The simplest path: open strava.com in Safari, Chrome or Firefox on your phone, sign in, and use the desktop method above. The .gpx file downloads to your « Downloads » folder — from where you can share it, email it, or drop it into GPXchunk.

IV.And then?

You have your .gpx. To analyse any precise portion — the long climb, the closing kilometres, a technical descent — without staying inside the Strava system, GPXchunk does exactly that: in the browser, no account, nothing leaves the page.

If you're stepping out of Strava to analyse elsewhere, the export itself isn't really the question — it's the move to a tool with a different model. GPXchunk vs Strava vs Garmin Connect spells out what each tool does, and what it refuses to do.

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