The steps
- Log in on strava.com in a browser. Strava’s help page says exporting is only available on the website, not in the app.
- Open Settings from the menu under your name, top right, then the My Account tab.
- Under Download your account, choose Get Started, then Request download.
- Wait for the email. Strava says it “may take a few hours”, and that you need access to the email address on your Strava profile, because that is where the link goes.
- Download the ZIP from the link and keep it as it is.
Source: Strava Support, “How do I export my Strava data?”, checked 22 October 2026.
What is in the ZIP
The part that matters for a year in review is activities.csv: one row per activity, with its date, name, type, elapsed and moving time, distance, elevation and the gear you used. Exports from 2025 and 2026 that people have published have 101 and 105 columns. Next to it is a folder called activities with one route file per activity that has GPS: a GPX file, or the original file from your watch or bike computer compressed as .fit.gz or .tcx.gz. Strava’s help page notes that in many cases the original is a FIT file.
The archive also holds bikes.csv and shoes.csv, the gear you have added, and other files about the rest of your account. If you have years of activities and photos, the ZIP can run to gigabytes. Yearlap reads it without unzipping: it reads the table of contents at the end of the file and then only activities.csv and the gear lists, straight from your disk.
Your export is in your account’s language
Strava writes activities.csv in the language of your account. A French export starts with “ID de l’activité, Date de l’activité” and writes dates as “18 mai 2026, 05:35:05”; an English one says “Activity ID, Activity Date” and “Aug 1, 2020, 12:02:05 AM”. The first distance column follows the language too (“4,97” in French, “73.47” in English), while a second distance column further along stays in metres with a decimal point.
Many scripts and apps expect the English names and fail on anything else; one research package tells you to switch Strava to English and request the export again. A user on the Endurain project reported that changing the website’s language did not change the language of their export. Yearlap reads the columns by position instead, so any language works as it is.
Sources: the French header and row in Endurain issue 645; the English header and row in Timelinize issue 137; the English-only note in the Athlytics documentation.
Rows that say #error#
Now and then the file name column says “#error#” instead of a path such as activities/123.fit.gz. In the Timelinize report it was one activity out of about 360: the activity opened fine on Strava, but Strava could not export its original file. Those activities still have their date, time and distance in activities.csv, so they count in your totals; they are only missing from the route poster.
When the email doesn’t come
- Give it a few hours, as Strava says, and look in your spam or promotions folder.
- Check which email address your Strava profile uses: the link goes there, not to the address you might expect.
- Ask again from the website if a day has passed. The request isn’t available in the app.
Then open it
Your year in review appears in the browser tab: distance, hours, climbing, sports, months, the hours you train, your longest day and streak, and story cards. Nothing is uploaded. We count page visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics: no cookies, no personal data, and never your files.