I have come across 3 possible reasons (and solutions) as to why your elapsed and moving time on Strava may not be correct:
Solution 1: You tagged your activity as a race
https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articl…
The main take-home from their page is this:
1) If you say your activity is a RACE, then Strava will display elapsed time for your moving time.
2) If your activity is an indoor workout such as Yoga, or treadmill or trainer... it will show elapsed time.
Hope this helps explain to others how that works. If you want to not show elapsed time, you can try not tagging your activity as a race, or make sure that it is not an indoor workout.
Solution 2: Try using the "Calculate Distance" and "Ignore Big Gaps" feature in GOTOES
If you select this option, you can effectively insert stopped time into your resulting file. So, if you're exporting as a FIT file, and the tool detects that there aren't any timestamps for a while (you set the duration in the drop down - in my screen shot below, I have it set to one minute)... then the GOTOES tool will insert a FIT "stop/start" tag. This means that anytime there is a dropout of points that is longer than a minute, it will insert a stop... and there will not be a start until the timestamps resume. Screen shot below so you know what to select. Please note that if you have "one second recording" turned on or if you're using a power meter on a bicycle, you can choose 10 seconds... or even 2 seconds for this option. This is because the file has a point taken every second, so even a gap of 2 seconds would trigger a stop (giving you a finer granularity of stopped time).
Please note: It is not possible to put stopped time in a GPX file. It IS possible to put stopped time in a TCX file, but some platforms (like Strava) will override stopped time in TCX files. Therefore, the best way to ensure that you get stopped time in your file is to export from GOTOES in the FIT file format. There are some situations, however, when this will not solve the issue - so see Solution 3.
- Fixing Moving Time that isn't Correct on Strava
Solution 3: Try using/not using the "Try and Insert Stopped Time" feature in GOTOES
By default, I have the "Try and Insert Stopped Time" box checked. Here is where that option lies in GOTOES:
- This is where to find the toggle to insert Stopped Time into your FIT file on GOTOES.
However, there may be times when you don't want to use this feature. The way this feature works when you have the box checked is that if the tool detects a gap of 30 seconds or more, it will insert stopped time into your FIT file. This is a useful feature for people who start and stop their GPS devices (in other words, these people are manually inserting their own stopped time by pausing the activity). However, if you leave your GPS running for the entire event, the GOTOES tool will not be able to detect your actual stopped time. If the tool tries to "guess" your stopped time using the criteria above, it may get the stopped time wrong. Here are two examples on a recent project I helped with:
- This is what the activity looked like with the "Try and Insert Stopped Time" box checked by default. Notice how the speed looks like a flat line with a couple spikes. The problem here is that Strava respected the (incorrect) stopped time that we calculated from an activity where the user had the GPS running the whole time on an ultra-endurance event... but the GPS had 3 instances with >30 second gaps in recording - which erroneously triggered a stop/start event.
- This is what the activity looked like when I UNchecked the "Try and Insert Stopped Time" option. Notice how the speed graph looks much more accurate. In this situation, GOTOES creates the FIT File with ONE start and ONE stop (when you began / ended the activity). When Strava sees an activity with one start and stop, Strava will automatically calculate your moving time. In certain cases, this is the best way to get the most accurate result. It may not exactly match your GPS, but it will be fairly accurate.
Basically, if you have the box checked, you're telling GOTOES to insert any auto-pause > 30 seconds. If you have it unchecked, you're telling GOTOES to not include any stopped time (unless you used Solution #2 above), and let Strava figure it out.
Strava details how they handle auto-pause here.