Activity route matching

Intervals.icu will now recognise your favourite routes. You can see your progress, automatically name activities based on the route (no more “Cape Town Cycling” for everything!), tag activities and flag commutes. Indoor activities with GPS data also get routes. This is a premium feature for supporters (thanks everyone!).

Activities with a route get a route tab:

The chart shows fields selected activities over time with a trend line (7 activity moving average). Click “Fields” to choose what to display on the chart. Click “Columns” to choose what to display on the grid. Click the headers to sort.

Click the name of the route to edit it:

If you have Strava connected and have ticked this box in /settings then name and commute changes from routes are pushed back to Strava:

The actions menu is as follows:

Screenshot 2025-02-01 at 15.29.26

The “Apply Route” action will update the name, tags and commute flag for the selected activities to match the route. Compare goes to the compare page to compare the selected activities.

The map icon in the top right hand corner of the map pops it out into its own resizeable window:

If you add the “Map” column to the grid you can also click that to see the map for each activity on the route. Activities do not need to match the route exactly.

You can add “Route” and “Route ID” columns to the list view. The “Map” column is also useful when reviewing routes:

There is a new checkbox on the Edit → Analyse dialog to look for routes on the selected activities.

All supporter activities from 2025 should already have routes. You can use this to fill in your history.

If you see two activities that have separate routes that you would prefer to be one then you can combine them using “Merge Routes” on the edit menu:

The dialog shows both routes on the map and you can choose which one to keep. All activities on the deleted route are moved to the kept route:

You can filter for activities by route ID (enter space separated list of route IDs):

If you just want to see all the activities on a route the route tab on one of the activities is easier.

The icon next to the list view icon goes to the new routes page showing all of your routes, the most recent activity for each (navigates to its routes tab), an icon to display the map and other information.

You can merge routes here using the Edit menu.

Deleted routes are shown strike through. You can easily find them by clicking the “Activity Count” column to sort least activities first. Click a deleted route to undelete it. You can use the activity list view Edit → Analyse “Only find routes” to get activities that should be on the deleted route back on it.

Thanks to everyone who helped beta test this!

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Nice feature!! Love it :slight_smile:

For future iterations, have you considered doing it for “sections” of the routes? As a matter of fact, the (my) way in and out of Madrid towards the south follows always the same path, and then when we get to San Martin de la Vegas we have a few options to chose from, so we mix & match a bit. Hence, the match will hardly be on the whole route (other than boring days :P) but there’s definitely something to be looked into for the consistent section (there’s also a couple short climbs in there!)

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We may have to wait until Strava’s patents (on the highly novel idea of “measuring how long it took to travel along a certain path”…) start expiring on Mar. 31, 2031 for that, unfortunately. Unless some David can work with some lawyers to find a non-infringing implementation, or decide with sufficient certainty that the patents are unenforcable. I notice at least RWGPS has implemented something similar to this idea.

I tot Garmin has segments too?

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Segments also exist in Garmin Connect… Not only in Strava

Very cool new feature! :hugs:

@david you are reading my mind. I was just to post a feature request.

Now please do this for the segments as well. Intervals already recognizes Strava segments, so if you could add them to favourites and compare, that would be awesome.

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Great feature! I agree on segments, would be awesome.

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Does the automatic route naming (and the Strava activity automatically renamed) only occur after you click on the Actions tab for each new route in Intervals.icu?

It should happen for new activities straight away. Not for old activities.

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just made a new activity that is supposed to match an existing route, nothing happens, the activity is not renamed and also doesn’t seem to match the existing route , am I missing someething?


maybe it was due to an offset in GPS data, in another instance it worked

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I have just done an activity on an existing route, the activity has recognized the route but the name has not been updated even thought it has rename activities set to Yes.

Is this because it was matched to a planned activity and the planned name is used instead. Is there any way to use the route name instead of the planned name on some activities ( I can imagine in some instances you would prefer to keep the planned name if it was descriptive of the workout you did)

Currently the planned name will override the name from the route. I don’t think there is a “right” way to do that, some people will want the planned name to be used, some not.

I am looking at routes 306474 and 559974 and wondering why 2 distinct routes were created here. Perhaps a glitch?

Could you please msg me the activity that created 559974. Then I can look in the logs and see why it didn’t match 306474. Tx.

My feedback that is limiting my excitement about this feature is that I can’t see that it can tell laps of a course apart. I may do an event on a course that is 4, 10, 21, 19, 20 laps long. It may also include cool-down meandering perhaps, so almost never are 2 activities on the ‘same’ route identical.

I do applaud innovation, but if you could detect the occurrence of a lap even if that means my first and last lap of a 3+ lap event are discarded because they have non-conforming sections that would be great!

That makes it more like segments than routes. Which for sure would be a wonderful feature to get, but wasn’t the intention here.

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I had similar thoughts as per above, where an example would be I go to a running track and do a bunch of laps. It would be great I could use this feature to tag and change the name of the activity for any time I go to this particular track, I may do more or less laps. I created this Route: ID 544938 - Knox Running Track.

I had a look and that activity didn’t match the two existing routes with close start and end points because of the height check. The existing routes are 1070m and 705m high and the new activity is only 476m. I removed that check to test and it would have failed the route matching anyway (too many different points) so I think things are working as expected.

I need to pay close attention to these because a bug that caused lots of extra routes to be created would be annoying and use up space.

It is as @David_R says, that would require segments. Unfortunately I can’t do those (Strava patents).

The original use-case for this was comparing your time over the route each time you do it. That wouldn’t work if the distance wasn’t taken into account.