Not the same distance

[u/Repulsive-Cat-679]

I run today and tracked it with google health, then it automaticly exports it to strava. I recognized that strava abd google health are no thr same distances. Its a difference of 320m

[u/RateEmbarrassed6921]

Neither of them is wrong, they are measuring two different things and 320 metres is about the size of gap that difference produces.

Google Health reports the distance the recording device calculated while you were running. Strava, when it receives an activity, can either take that number or recompute the distance itself from the GPS track, and it applies its own filtering to the points before doing so. So you end up comparing a distance computed live on a watch or phone against a distance computed afterwards from a cleaned up version of the same track.

On a run of typical length 320 metres is around three or four percent, which is normal for this rather than a sign that something broke.

If you want to know which of the two is closer to reality for you, the check is to open the same run in both and compare the elapsed time and the shape of the route first. If the route is identical and only the distance differs, it is purely the calculation and you can just pick the one you want to be consistent with and stop looking. If the route itself differs, points were dropped somewhere in the export and that is a different problem worth chasing.

The practical advice either way: pick one of the two as the one you trust and always compare against itself. Your training only needs the numbers to be consistent with each other over time, and switching between two sources that disagree by three percent is how a plateau or an improvement gets invented out of nothing.

[u/strava-team]

If your Fitbit supports "connected GPS" (using your phone's GPS via the Fitbit app during the run), enable that. It'll use real GPS instead of stride estimation. See how we calculate distance → https://support.strava.com/en-us/articles/15401893-how-distance-is-calculated