The Science Behind Your Strava Friends Logging More Miles Than You
The friendship paradox: runners edition
Looking through my Strava feed can be overwhelming, especially since I joined a running group a few months ago. Most of my running buddies are logging a lot of miles, and I mean A LOT!
Turns out it is a phenomenon that exists in any social network:
- In real life, your friends are likely to have more friends than you.
- On Instagram, people you follow have more followers than you.
Let’s dissect that.
The friendship paradox
This apparent paradox has been known since 1991 thanks to sociologist Scott L. Feld. It states that:
On average, an individual’s friends have more friends than that individual.
The equations are not too complex for those who have studied graph theory a bit but I will not go into that level of detail here.
The intuition is as such: there exists roughly two types of people.
- Those (most people) who have a small number of friends.
- Those (few people) who have a very large number of friends.
This second group is responsible for the Friendship paradox. It only takes for you to have one popular friend to artificially raise the average number of friends of your friends!
The generalized friendship paradox
Now that I have introduced the friendship paradox, I can discuss the Generalized Friendship Paradox:
On average, an individual’s friends have higher characteristics than that individual.
For example, it only takes one of your friends to be a billionaire to artificially raise your friends’ friends’ average wealth.
With respect to Strava, I happen to have an ultra trail runner friend. He is definitely messing up my friends’ average yearly mileage!
This happens because of friendship/followers dynamics. We follow athletes on Strava because they inspire us. I follow some of the best runners in my local running group to get a sneak peek into their training and get ideas for future me. These people inspire so many others, naturally have more followers, and are running a lot more than me.
Use Strava responsibly
Strava is an amazing tool that helps us be engaged and stay motivated, but is not a competition! Leave that for race day — even if you are probably competing more against yourself than against others.
Knowing that it is normal to feel like most of my Strava connections are running more than me can help me keep things in perspective and stay focused on myself and avoid overtraining.
