‘You Are Not Your Results’: The Story Behind Strava’s New PT Sport Type

It was a Wednesday afternoon in February, the last day of a President’s Day ski trip with her family, when Michelle Chang heard the pop. She was carving a run she’d done dozens of times, moving a little too fast over some mounds, when her body threw back while her skis kept going. Ski patrol tobogganed her down the mountain. She was that person in the sled.

The diagnosis: a torn ACL and a partial meniscus tear. Her 2026, as she’d planned it, was over before spring arrived.

But even in the emergency room, something characteristically product-minded kicked in. 

“I was laying on the gurney in the ER, editing my Activity title (“Pow then ow” - it was a fresh powder day) when I thought: I need to document my recovery on Strava,” said Michelle Chang, Sr. Director of Product, Strava.

That instinct, to document, to share, to belong, ran headlong into a gap she’d always felt but never named. Injured athletes, she realized, tend to go quiet. They disappear from feeds, stop logging, and slip away from the community that could help them most. 

“In all my injuries, I’ve always slunk away and disappeared from Strava,” she said.

The product idea crystallized in an elevator. One morning on crutches, she found herself riding up with Strava CEO Michael Martin. She made her pitch: if Strava counts a walk or a weight session, why not a heel slide?

THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE NEED

What followed was the kind of research that reframes a product problem entirely. The data on injury wasn’t a niche concern,  it was a near-universal athletic experience hiding in plain sight.

• 60% of Olympic athletes get injured during training.

• 73% of women runners are injured over a two-year period.

“Injury isn’t a detour from an athletic life,” Chang says. “It’s nearly a statistical certainty.”

That framing matters. If injury is not an exception but an inevitability for most active people, then a platform built around performance metrics and personal records could be missing part of every athlete’s story.

REDEFINING WHAT COUNTS

The stigma around physical therapy, Chang acknowledges, is real. 

“To some, PT might mean you aren’t experienced, you pushed too hard, you were reckless, or you’re a beginner. It’s another label for you’re not a high-performing athlete, you’re old.”

Her answer to that stigma is blunt: “Physical therapy is exactly that — physical.” It’s not a footnote to athletic life; it’s part of it. The new PT sport type doesn’t ask users to minimize or apologize for where they are in their journey. It asks them to log it, share it, and receive the kudos they’ve earned.

The picture Chang paints of  this feature is deliberately expansive: a high schooler with tennis elbow, an avid cyclist nursing a hamstring strain, an elite runner managing IT band syndrome, someone’s mom who broke her ankle on a hike.

 “It’s for anyone who wants to share their movement and hear from their community — and for anyone who needs to track progress to stay motivated toward the next milestone.”

THE COMMUNITY MOMENT THAT MATTERS MOST

There’s a particular athlete Chang has in mind when she talks about why this matters. It’s the person sitting out right now, watching their friends’ activities roll by on the feed, not logging anything because it doesn’t feel like it counts.

To that person, she offers something harder won than a product feature: “Move through the defeats without being defeated. The process is where you’ll find the greenest shoots – and this is where you’ll discover and build the tenacity and strength that you’ll call upon years later.”

Strava, as she puts it, has always been a place where the community keeps you honest. Now it can also keep you going, not just through the PRs, but through the work that makes the PRs possible again.

A FULLER PICTURE

One of the phrases Chang returns to belongs to Jessie Diggins, America’s most decorated cross-country skier: “You are not your results.” It’s become something of a north star for how Chang thinks about this physical therapy feature, and about her own recovery.

“Sometimes you have to put your goals away for a bit, and let life surprise you,” she says. “I’ve come out of each injury more adventurous and more nimble than the last.”

Physical therapy as a sport type isn’t just a new logging option. It’s an acknowledgment that Strava has captured the peaks while leaving the lulls unrecorded. Strava should account for all of it.

“I can't wait to see our community log their PT journeys on Strava. You're all getting Kudos from me — and I'm biased, but our Year in Sport recaps are going to be awesome,” said Chang.