Three places a caption can live
- The title. The one line under your name in the feed, and what most people are picturing. Strava says titled activities are almost four times more likely to get kudos. That’s its own figure, from a press release selling Quick Edit, and it doesn’t claim the title causes the kudos.
- The description. The text box under the title. Run notes, a paragraph, a poem, a gear list. Anyone who can see the activity can read it. You can’t make it private on its own; Strava’s answer is the private notes field, which only you see.
- The Instagram caption. When you tap share on an activity, Strava builds an image from the map or one of your photos and lays stats on top: moving time, distance and elevation for rides, or moving time, distance and pace for runs and swims. Title and description aren’t among them, so you write the Instagram caption from scratch.
Photos on an activity don’t have a caption field, though photos in an Athlete Post do. If you’re adding a photo to a run and want to say something about it, use the description.
How to edit it
On the phone: open the activity, tap the three dots, then Edit. On the web: open the activity and click the pencil. If the activity came in from a watch or a bike computer, Strava also puts a Quick Edit sheet in front of you the next time you open it or the Home tab, with the title, description, tags, photos, privacy and hidden stats together. Quick Edit is mobile only and doesn’t show for manual activities or ones recorded in the Strava app itself.
Writing your own
Strava already shows the distance, the time and the pace, so the caption is for the one thing the numbers don’t say. Name the dog, the coffee shop, the hill. One detail beats three. Keep the title to a line and put the rest in the description. Anyway, 60 to steal.
One word
For when the run says enough. These work as a title on their own.
- Done.
- Legs.
- Cooked.
- Oops.
- Again.
- Enough.
- Slow.
- Ouch.
Funny
- Pace is a social construct.
- Not lost. Exploring. (Lost.)
- Plan said easy. Nobody told my legs.
- A labradoodle outsprinted me at the park gate and I’m fine about it.
- Negative split, if you count the part where I stopped.
- Every hill on this route took it personally.
- Recovery run. Recovering from the last recovery run.
- Watch said 9.98. Don’t ask.
Long runs
- Two hours of thinking about a bagel.
- Long run done. Sofa run begins.
- 20 miles, four gels, one existential wobble at mile 16.
- The first hour is a run. The rest is a negotiation.
- Ran past three coffee shops and into a fourth.
- Everything after the turnaround was a rumour.
New shoes
Add the pair to your gear on Strava while you’re at it, so the mileage tracks.
- New shoes. Old legs.
- Mile 0 of about 500.
- New pair. Two blisters. Even.
- Fresh foam, same pace. I was promised more.
- New shoes, so this counts as a race.
- The box said breathable. My heels disagree.
- First run in the new pair. Third “last run” in the old ones.
Rides
- Headwind both ways. Physics owes me one.
- Coffee ride. Rode to the coffee. That’s the whole report.
- Group ride. Dropped on the first climb, caught them at the lights.
- Chain needs oil. So do I.
- Climbed for an hour to descend for six minutes. Worth it.
- Nobody pulled. Everybody complained.
- Zone 2, allegedly.
- Flat route, according to the person who planned it.
- Segment PR on the bit with the traffic light. I’ll take it.
Bad days
- It counts.
- Showed up. That was the workout.
- Some runs are for the log, not the story.
- Cut it short. Still longer than the sofa.
- Legs said no. Went anyway. Legs were right.
- Walked the hill. It’s still there.
- Not every run is a post. This one’s only here for the streak.
Races and PRs
- New PR. Old me is furious.
- Race day. Everything hurt in the correct order.
- Chip time and gun time disagree. I’m going with the chip.
- Didn’t PR. Did finish. Did eat.
- Trained for 16 weeks so I could feel this bad for 3 hours.
- Started too fast. Finished anyway. Learned nothing.
Early mornings
- Alarm at 5:15. Regret at 5:16. Fine by 6.
- Sunrise run. Nobody else was up to see it, so here it is.
- The birds were louder than my watch.
- Frost on the car, none on me by mile two.
For the Instagram post
The Strava share image carries the map and the stats, so the caption has to carry the story. Skip repeating the distance.
- The view was the point. The pace was a side effect.
- Ten miles for one photo of a heron. Fair trade.
- Out the door at dawn, back with a story and no feeling in my hands.
- Took the long way round the reservoir because the short way has that dog.
- Stopped for this photo. Also stopped for the hill, but there’s no photo of that.
Apps that write it for you
Most of these tools write titles, because that’s the field people mean. Stravify, Strautomator and Roast My Strava can also write into the description.
- Strautomator is an automation engine. Two of its AI actions write something you can see: generate the activity name with AI, and generate a poem with AI, which replaces whatever was in the description, so don’t pair it with one you wrote. You pick the model from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Mistral, OpenAI, Grok or Z.ai. Free accounts get AI on up to 10 percent of activities with smaller models; the poem action is PRO, which is $9.99 a year or $39.99 lifetime. Plain actions can set, prepend or append description text, with weather tags on the free plan; city tags and most music tags are PRO. On the free plan Strautomator also appends its own link line to the description of about one in five activities it touches (its maker told us), or a #strautomator hashtag instead if you pick that in preferences. Only PRO turns it off.
- Stravify writes an AI title and description in a voice you pick (Funny, Motivational, a gentle roast, or your own instructions). Its automatic rewrites replace both on new activities, so an existing description is overwritten.
- Bandók renames new rides, runs and walks from a hand-picked list, no AI, and skips anything you named yourself. Free, donations welcome.
- Roast My Strava writes three titles for an activity in a Funny, Roast, Clever, Hype, Plain or Me (your own style) tone, eight sets a day, free, and sets the one you pick on Strava. In early access it can also title new default-named activities automatically, with a Training style added, free during that release. Either way it adds a one-line credit to the description, and its automatic roasts, also in early access, can add a two-sentence roast above it. Its Activity Roast, a line-by-line take on one workout, can be added to the description too.
The title tools are compared in more depth in the best Strava title generators, including a few that no longer work.
Common questions
Is there a character limit on Strava titles or descriptions?
Strava doesn’t publish one, and the API reference lists no maximum length for either field. The feed only shows the first line or so of a title anyway, so keep it short and put the rest in the description.
Sources
- Strava press release, September 25, 2024: Quick Edit debuts on Strava, the source of the kudos figure
- Strava Help Center: Activity Quick Edit, the fields on the sheet and when it appears
- Strava Help Center: Privacy Controls FAQ, on descriptions and private notes
- Strava Help Center: Sharing Your Strava Activities, what the shared image contains
- Strava Help Center: Adding videos and photos to your activity and Athlete Posts
- Strava Help Center: Run activity pages and How do I change my activity type, the edit steps on web and mobile
- Strava Help Center: Adding gear to your activities
- Strava API reference, the activity name and description fields
- Strautomator: AI features, its pricing, FAQ, account settings and open-source core
- Stravify (and its terms) and Bandók
- Roast My Strava: Strava Title Generator and Automatic Strava Titles
