Guide

Strava duplicate activities: why your ride shows up twice

One ride, two activities in your feed, and your weekly distance counted twice. It happens to anyone who records on more than one thing at once — a watch and a bike computer, or a Garmin and Zwift — and it has a tidier fix than deleting half your data. This page covers why it happens, the upload error that names a duplicate, how to remove one, and how to end up with a single complete activity instead.

Why the same ride appears twice

Strava doesn't duplicate anything by itself — it receives the ride twice, from two different places:

• Two connected services. The most common setup: Garmin Connect and Zwift are both linked to Strava, you ride Zwift with a watch or Edge recording as well, and each service pushes its own copy.
• Two devices on one account. A watch and a head unit both syncing through Garmin Connect, each with its own recording of the same ride.
• A sync plus a manual upload. You uploaded a file by hand that a connected service later delivered anyway.

The annoying part isn't the clutter, it's that the two copies hold different data. The watch has heart rate, Body Battery, Stamina and laps; Zwift or the head unit has power, cadence, distance, elevation and the route. Delete either one and you lose something real.

“Duplicate of…” — when Strava refuses the upload

Uploading a file by hand can produce an error naming an activity already in your account, along the lines of 2026-09-15-20-06-32.fit duplicate of Zwift - London Loop in London. It means Strava has decided this file is a ride you already have.

Strava doesn't publish the rules it uses. In practice it looks at when the activity started and how long it ran, so a file covering the same stretch of time as an existing activity is normally refused — regardless of which device recorded it or what's inside. The fix is to delete the activity Strava named, then upload again.

Can you merge two activities on Strava?

No. There's no merge feature: Strava will let you delete an activity, but it won't combine two into one, and support can't do it for you either. Anything that produces a single activity containing both recordings has to happen before the upload, by merging the underlying files.

When they aren't duplicates at all — one ride, split in two

A different problem that looks the same in your feed: the ride stopped and restarted, so you have two activities covering consecutive stretches rather than the same stretch twice. Auto-save firing at a coffee stop, a head unit crashing mid-ride, or a deliberate warm-up file plus the main event all produce this.

Deleting one would throw away half the ride, and Strava can't stitch them together. What you want is to join the two files end to end before uploading: drop both into BikeSync and pick One after the other — it's selected automatically when the files don't overlap in time. The legs are sorted by start time, distance carries on across the join instead of restarting at zero, and the gap between them is recorded as a timer pause so it counts toward elapsed time but not moving time. Upload the joined file and delete the two originals.

Deleting a duplicate

If you only want the clutter gone, open the activity you don't want and delete it from the three-dot or edit menu on the activity page. Two things worth knowing first:

• Check which copy you're deleting. They rarely hold the same data. Open both and see which has power, which has heart rate, and which has the route.
• Segment efforts go with it. If the copy you delete is the one with GPS — on an indoor ride, that's usually the Zwift one — its segment results disappear too.

The better fix: merge the two recordings

Instead of choosing which half of your ride to throw away, combine the two files into one activity and upload that:

1. Export both original files — the Garmin one from Garmin Connect (it arrives as a zip) and the Zwift one from zwift.com or your device.
2. Merge them. The watch recording stays the base, keeping heart rate, laps, physiology and device identity, while the other file supplies power, cadence, distance, elevation and the route.
3. Delete both originals from Strava, then upload the merged file.

You end up with one activity that has everything, counted once.

When the merged file is itself called a duplicate

This catches people out: you merge two recordings, upload the result, and Strava rejects it as a duplicate. Nothing is wrong with the file — it simply covers the same period as the two originals, which are still sitting in your account.

Two ways through:

• Delete the originals first, then upload the merged file. Cleanest, and the order the step list above uses.
• Give the merged file a fresh identity. BikeSync's Randomize file ID option (on by default) writes a new serial number and shifts the file's creation time, so the merged ride uploads alongside the originals and you can delete them afterwards once you've checked the result. Garmin Connect is stricter than Strava here and checks more than the serial number, which is why the timestamp is shifted too.

Either way, don't leave all three on your account — that's a genuine duplicate, and it inflates your totals and leaderboards.

Stopping it happening next time

• Leave one upload path connected. If Garmin Connect and Zwift both link to Strava, disconnect whichever you don't want pushing rides. The other keeps working as normal.
• Or keep both and merge each time. More work per ride, but it's the only option that preserves data from both devices.
• Decide per device, not per ride. If a watch records only for Body Battery and training load, it doesn't need to reach Strava at all — let the head unit or Zwift handle that side.