The condition of your hiking gear - especially your shoes or boots - plays a major role in your comfort, safety, and overall experience on the trail. Over time, hiking footwear gradually loses its support, grip, and cushioning, often without obvious signs. That's where gear tracking becomes a valuable tool.
Gear tracking is a simple but powerful feature available in many fitness apps. It lets you log the use of specific gear, like hiking shoes, backpacks, or trekking poles, alongside your recorded activities. By automatically keeping track of distance, time, and terrain, you can monitor how much wear your gear has experienced and know when it's time for maintenance or replacement.
Tracking your hiking gear helps prevent discomfort and injuries that can result from worn-out equipment. It also ensures that you're getting the best performance out of your boots and other gear for every adventure. Plus, it's satisfying to look back and see how many miles your favourite pair of boots have carried you!
Gear Tracking in Fitness Apps
Many fitness apps offer gear tracking features. I know that Strava and Garmin Connect provide this functionality for free, but in this article, I'll demonstrate how gear tracking works in SportTracks, the fitness app I personally use. Although SportTracks isn't free - it costs $59 per year - its feature set fits my needs well, so I continue to use it, and it includes built-in gear tracking.
Gathering Usage Stats
In order to track a gear item, we first need to add it to our account. SportTracks provides the following form for gear addition, we can see that it supports a nice set of details, including the photo:
I record my activities with my Garmin watch. Once an activity is completed, the corresponding .fit file - which contains all the recorded data - is uploaded to my Garmin Connect account. I've configured SportTracks as one of the Connected Apps in my Garmin Connect settings, so every new activity in my Garmin account is automatically synced to my SportTracks account.
Each activity (workout) in SportTracks contains the "Gear" section where you can add one or more gear items that you've used in that activity, for example:
The gear item can be configured to be manually added to every activity of a specific type, which can be convenient, but for hiking footwear I prefer to set the used gear myself, since I wear different shoes depending on the trail and weather.
Reports
So, how is this data used?
There is a dashboard which lists all your gear with the most important information, for example:
And there is also a detailed report for a specific gear item. As an example, in the following screenshot we can see the usage graph of my old pair of shoes. It shows that I've used them for over 1200km in a 12-month period, which is kind of satisfying to see!
The "Workouts" section provides a list of all the workouts where I've used these shoes.
The main purpose of this information is to provide awareness of how much some gear has been used and to let us plan for replacement or maintenance.
