Can Strava replace a training plan?

No. Strava records and analyses runs you already decided to do. It has no view on what you should run tomorrow, how fast, or what to change when you miss a session. Plenty of runners self-coach out of it, which works until they have a specific target.

Do my Strava runs get into Shed?

If Strava writes to Apple Health, or if the watch that fed Strava also wrote to Apple Health, then yes. In practice most runners have the watch writing to Health directly, which is the cleaner path and carries better data.

Does Shed post to Strava?

No. Shed does not write to Strava and has no social features of its own.

Is Strava premium worth it alongside Shed?

For different reasons, yes. Strava premium is for segments, route building and the social layer. It is not a training plan and paying for it does not get you one.

Compare

Shed vs Strava

Strava is where your running lives after you have done it. Shed decides what you do next: the session, the pace, the reason, and what to change when your week goes wrong. Almost nobody has to choose between these two, and the comparison is really about what Strava does not do.

Head to head

Bold marks the decisive difference on that row, whichever side it falls.

	Shed	Strava
Tells you what to run	Every session, to your race date.	No.
Prescribes pace	Yes, and tells you when you ran through the easy range.	No.
Adapts to your recovery	Yes. Sleep, resting heart rate and HRV change tomorrow.	No.
Coaching conversation	Yes.	No.
Price	$19.99 a month.	Free tier. Premium around $11.99 a month.
Social	None. No feed, no kudos, no leaderboards.	The whole point. Clubs, segments, kudos, the feed.
Segments and history	No segments.	Years of history you are not going to move.

Strava is a record, not a plan

This sounds obvious and is worth saying, because a lot of runners are effectively self-coaching out of Strava. They look at last week, feel roughly how it went, and decide this week from that. It works for a while, especially when fitness is climbing on its own.

It stops working when you have a specific target. Strava has no opinion about whether you should run intervals on Tuesday, no view on how long your long run should be in week nine, and no way to tell you that three days of poor sleep mean today is not the day. It shows you what you did and who else did it faster.

The segment problem

Strava is very good at making you race your easy runs. A segment on your regular loop, a friend who ran it faster last week, and suddenly a recovery run has a competitive layer that has no business being there.

The most common training error in recreational running is that easy runs are run too hard, which blunts the hard sessions that are supposed to do the work. Strava does not cause that, but it does not help. Shed prescribes an easy range and tells you when you ran through it, which is an unglamorous feature that fixes more races than any workout.

Frequently asked

Can Strava replace a training plan?: No. Strava records and analyses runs you already decided to do. It has no view on what you should run tomorrow, how fast, or what to change when you miss a session. Plenty of runners self-coach out of it, which works until they have a specific target.
Do my Strava runs get into Shed?: If Strava writes to Apple Health, or if the watch that fed Strava also wrote to Apple Health, then yes. In practice most runners have the watch writing to Health directly, which is the cleaner path and carries better data.
Does Shed post to Strava?: No. Shed does not write to Strava and has no social features of its own.
Is Strava premium worth it alongside Shed?: For different reasons, yes. Strava premium is for segments, route building and the social layer. It is not a training plan and paying for it does not get you one.

The short version

Shed writes the block. Every session, every pace.

You give it a race and a date. It builds the weeks around the days you can actually run, reads every run off your Apple Watch the same day, and rebuilds the week when the week falls apart. $19.99 a month. The block is written and on your phone before you decide.

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