Strava activities: why some rides show no data in IntervalCoach

Some athletes see an outdoor ride on their Intervals.icu calendar that never shows up in IntervalCoach: no duration, no power, no training load. Meanwhile their Zwift or TrainerRoad sessions count normally. This article explains why that happens and how to fix it.

The cause: Strava locks its data for other apps

If an activity reaches Intervals.icu through Strava, Strava's API terms do not allow Intervals.icu to share that activity's data with connected apps like IntervalCoach. Intervals.icu itself can show you the ride, but all it may pass on to us is an empty placeholder: a date and an id, with no time, power, heart rate, or training load. This is a Strava policy, not a bug in Intervals.icu or IntervalCoach.

Activities that reach Intervals.icu directly (from Garmin, Wahoo, Zwift, TrainerRoad, a file upload, and similar) come through with full data and count normally.

How to recognize it

The pattern is distinctive: your indoor or direct-synced sessions have complete data in IntervalCoach, while your outdoor rides show zero duration and no training load, so your Fitness (CTL) drifts lower than it should. If that matches what you see, Strava is the only route those outdoor rides are taking into Intervals.icu.

The fix: connect your recording device directly to Intervals.icu

Connect the platform of the device you record with (Garmin Connect, Wahoo, Suunto, COROS, Polar) straight to Intervals.icu: on Intervals.icu, open Settings and link it in the connections section. From then on your outdoor activities arrive with full data, and IntervalCoach picks them up automatically. Strava can stay connected alongside; it just should not be the only route.

If you record outdoor rides with the Strava phone app, there is no direct route: the file only exists at Strava. You can export each ride from Strava (open the activity and choose Export Original) and upload it on Intervals.icu, or switch to recording with an app or device that syncs to Intervals.icu directly.

Recovering a past ride

To fix an individual ride that already came through as a placeholder: download the original file from Strava (Export Original on the activity page) and upload it on Intervals.icu via Activities → Upload. The real ride replaces the placeholder and IntervalCoach processes it from there.

For the background on why IntervalCoach is built on Intervals.icu rather than Strava, see Why IntervalCoach uses Intervals.icu, not Strava directly.