If you already track your swims with Strava — or with a Garmin watch that syncs to Strava — you don't have to re-record them here. Connect once and every open-water swim in your Strava activity history shows up on your OpenWaterSpots profile, with the same distance, duration, and pace. Pool swims are deliberately excluded — OpenWaterSpots is an open-water platform, and pool training has nothing to do with the spot database.
To connect: sign in, head to your Profile → Edit, and click Connect Strava under "Connected accounts". You'll be taken to Strava to approve. Approve it, and you're back on OpenWaterSpots in two clicks.
To sync: click Sync now on the same page. It pulls your 100 most recent activities, keeps only the swim ones, and adds any that aren't already imported. Repeat the click whenever you want fresh data — typically after a swim.
Garmin users: enable Garmin → Strava auto-sync in Garmin Connect (Settings → Account → Partner Connections → Strava). Your Garmin swims flow into Strava automatically, and we read them from there. We don't talk to Garmin directly because Garmin's consumer API is enterprise-gated.
What you keep, what you don't. We import the metadata: name, distance, duration, start time. We don't pull the full GPS line (it's a separate API call per activity and would burn your Strava quota), so Strava-imported swims show stats but no route map. Easy to add later if it matters to you.
Privacy: tokens are stored encrypted, you can disconnect any time, and disconnecting doesn't delete the imported swims — they become "yours" once they're in. Re-connecting later picks up wherever you left off.