Endurain

A number of years ago I deleted my Strava profile, and it's something I've never really missed. The social-media-ication of going for a run or a bike ride might have been fun in the early days, but things definitely changed for me over time:

• matters between people on the site which subsequently became issues

• personal privacy

• ownership of data

Privacy

The second point, is one that can sort-of be managed on the Strava platform. Ultimately you can show or hide your workouts to everybody, nobody or your followers. But the fact that the data is on the platform means that the overall control is given to an unknown third party. You might be comfortable with that (indeed there's some 3+ billion Facebook accounts actively sharing some or all of their creators' lives) but with an ever-increasingly connected world, not least with AI tools able to process an unimaginable amount of data, it's something that has made me less comfortable about the data I share to the internet.

Data Ownership

The third point relates to who actually owns your data. You'd like to think it was you, right? Yet the data is aggregated, sold on and used in ways long after you pressed stop on your fitness device. Of course you agreed to this when you clicked the 'I accept......' button when you created your account. And whilst there are privacy tools available on the platform I am always nervous as to what happens in practice when there is financial benefit in that data.

Again, you may be comfortable with all of this, but it's something that I gradually felt increasingly uneasy about, even though the account I had was relatively locked down.

Self Hosting with Endurain

I had dreamed about creating something myself, hosted on my own hardware, but lacked the knowledgeto do this, or even where to start. But then another athlete with those skills created that reality at the same time I was beginning to dip my toe into self-hosting my own services at home.

That project is Endurain.

Endurain runs happily in a docker container (although I believe one contributor has created a pathway to get it installed on bare-metal) and totally fits the bill in resolving my three bullet points above. Whilst not as feature-rich as the likes of Strava and Garmin, Endurain can take all the data from both of those platforms and put it into a 'feed' so you can go back and look at the data, safe in the knowledge that you control that data. You can host multiple accounts on the installation although this isn't something I'm doing personally as it's a place for me to be able to look back at the various runs I've done over the years.

The elephant in that room though is that as you're self-hosting the project, if there's a problem with your hardware or instance, it's up to you to fit. This in particular if you let your installation be used by a load of other people who will no doubt moan at you if you accidently lose all their data. Backups are a necessity!

As of July 2026 it's at version 0.19.0 currently in a 'feature freeze' whilst the developer makes sure the code is fit and stable to build on. Once he's happy with that, there is a roadmap of features to be included, but it's a healthy project being developed within a community wanting control of their sports data again.

If you would like to try Endurain out, the documentation is very straightforward (I managed it when I barely knew anything about Docker) and you don't need any powerhouse of hardware to run it (I've got it running on a N150 powered mini pc). And whilst I'm not an expert by any means, I have had my install running for almost a year now so if you have any basic questions I'm more than happy to try to answer them (technical stuff probably won't be something I can help with though)!