Activity name hack
Get your activity names from Strava
If you find yourself entering the names of your activities on Strava and then again on your Garmin, or if you don’t see the right names for your activities in Crickles, this post is for you.
As you will have seen on the Get Started page, Strava does not allow Intervals to pass activities onto other apps such as Crickles so it’s essential that you connect your Intervals account directly to your Garmin, Wahoo, Zwift and other devices. However, many of us use Strava as a social network for sports and other apps for personal analysis. In this common use pattern it is natural to enter meaningful activity names only on Strava. This means that you either see the default/wrong names in Crickles or you have to update the names once on Strava and again on Intervals or your device(s).
Fortunately, Intervals offers a hack. If you connect directly to your device(s) and to Strava, Intervals will spot when activities loaded directly and from Strava are the same. In this case, it will pass to Crickles most of the details read directly from your device, which is typically a richer dataset than Strava collects, and pass through just the name from Strava in place of the activity name from your device. For example, if you take a bike ride you might find that your Garmin assigns it a default name of, say, Islington Road Cycling while Strava calls it Morning Ride. If you connect Intervals only to your devices, it is the name from there - in this case Islington Road Cycling - that comes through to Crickles. If you are in the habit of giving descriptive names to the activities on your device so that you can, for example, make sense of them in Garmin Connect, then as you add these descriptive names Crickles will get them too. However, if your preference is to leave the device names alone and update only the Strava names these will be passed to Crickles - in preference to the device names - if you also set up a Strava connection in Intervals. The settings you need in Intervals to make this happen are these:
If you have not connected to Strava before and do so now you will find that the names you in Crickles of activities that you’ve done already will update to the Strava names, and any new activity names will come from Strava going forward. It is not possible to mix and match, with some activity names sourced from Garmin and others from Strava.
Note that in no case is Intervals permitted to pass on full activity details from Strava to Crickles. If in Intervals you connect your Garmin and also Strava and you have some activities on Strava that are not on Garmin or on any other device connected directly to Intervals then Crickles will not be able to see them. Likewise, if you download all of your old data from Strava to Intervals but do not also collect the same data directly from your devices then these old activities will not feed through to Crickles either.
Many thanks to David from Intervals for passing on this tip.