At Smashrun, we get a wide variety of runners who track their running: from beginners to marathoners, casual runners to ultrarunners. Our goal is to help you run consistently and tracking it, by far, is the easiest way to keep yourself on course.
Here are a few things you can do on Smashrun to help you get started.
Set a goal
After you log your first run, set a goal for the month. More importantly, set a long-term goal for the year.
It’s not always clear what the right goal might be when you’re starting out, but S.M.A.R.T. goals will keep you moving forward. Goal setting for new runners usually starts with increasing the amount of time on you’re feet, either based on duration and/or distance. Once you have a base, you can work on running faster.
Earn Badges
Use Smashrun’s badges as steppingstones towards running consistency. You can earn badges for running at certain times during the day, for logging enough distance, or building a base.
The badges are designed to encourage you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do - like run 10x before 7am to get the Early Bird. Or run every day during a leap year to earn the Leap Year Sweep! Whether you’re running to maintain fitness, or preparing for your first marathon - there are badges that will help you keep showing up.
To view a badge criteria, click on a badge within your badges page.
Choose a demographic
Selecting the right demographic can be the difference between being motivated by competition or being frustrated by it. So when you choose your demographic, the only question you should consider is whether or not the members of that demographic are similar to you.
What you don’t want to do is choose a demographic based on how high your rank is. If everyone did this, then all the ranks would average out and end up being pretty similar. You also don’t want to benchmark yourself against everyone, because it’s not a useful comparison in the long-term.
After joining a demographic, you’ll start to see how your running compares to others within your demographic. Everyday, we’ll add up how far, how often, and how fast everyone in each demographic ran, which means - your rank is a moving target. Luckily, you’ll know exactly how to move up within the ranks by mousing over the “details” of each category!
Find or follow similar runners
When you start running for the first time, it’s important to realize that there are other runners like you! Or, you may already have friends who run who’d be happy to cheer you on. And so we created a section where you can find and interact with other runners on Smashrun.
First, to find or follow other runners on Smashrun, you need to enable Social. All you have to do is click on the Social button on the Overview page and it will walk you through the different privacy configurations.
Within Social, you can load Similar Runners to discover runners who overlap with you in terms of pace and training volume, regardless of demographic. We calculate similarity based on training history over the past year. As a result, your similar runners may change because everyone has different training cycles and train for different events.
In addition to the Similar Runners feed, you can also click ‘Explore’ to see how users in any given social feed compare to one another.
And you can click on any username to see their profile, which compares your Quick Stats and Trends to that runner.
Once you have friends and/or followers, you’ll only receive an email notification for comments if you opt-in and everything else will show up when you click on the bell icon from your Overview page.
Next topic: Getting started with Smashrun