There’s a specific photo every endurance athlete has: arms up, clock overhead, face somewhere between agony and joy. It’s the best photo you’ll take all year. And it lives, today, between a screenshot of a parking app and a blurry picture of a menu.
That bothered us enough to build a company about it.
The work deserves an artifact
You don’t train for four months for a notification. You train for the thing the training makes you. A printed book is a way of saying that out loud — to yourself, and to whoever picks it up off your coffee table.
A camera roll is a timeline, and timelines bury things. The photo from April sits under every photo you took after it, a few thousand swipes down by the time the next race comes round. A print stays where you put it.
What does Skoma make from a race?
Skoma makes two things from a race: a hardcover book of the whole season, and a poster of the race itself. The book works like this:
- Pulls your training and race-day activities from Strava, with the photos you attached to them.
- Lays them out as an editable photobook — calendars, volume, milestones, maps, the finish.
- Lets you make it yours: drag, rewrite, re-theme, add your own photos.
- Prints it as a hardcover and ships it to your door.
The poster is the smaller object. Pick one of your Strava races, or upload the GPX or FIT file from your watch or the race website, and Skoma draws the course on the city’s street map. You choose the layout, the map style and the course colour, add the finish-line photo, and check your name and result. Posters come in A3, A2 and 50 × 70 cm, unframed or in a black, white or natural frame.
Not every finish line has a clock over it. For a multi-day walk like the Camino, the book follows the trip day by day instead: one page per stage, your photos matched to each day, and the arrival as the last page.
Do you need Strava?
No, Strava makes it automatic but isn’t required. Connecting it imports each run’s distance, duration, elevation, pace and route, plus its photos. Without it, you can add activities by hand, and the poster takes a GPX or FIT file straight from your watch or the race website. The finish-line photo usually comes from the race photographer or a friend’s phone anyway, so both the book and the poster take your own uploads.
Making and editing either one is free, and nothing is a subscription. You pay once, for the print. In the US a hardcover book starts at $49.99 for up to 50 pages.
Sometimes the finisher isn’t you. The photo you want printed might be of a partner, a parent or a friend crossing their first line. For that case there is a gift card: a voucher for a race poster or a printed book, sent by email on the day you pick, or handed over in person. They design it from their own runs, and we print it.
Where the photo goes in the book
In the book, the finish-line photo isn’t on its own. Race day gets a run of pages: the finish time, a letter drafted from your race stats that you can rewrite, a stats page and the route map. Photo galleries and a page for the bib come after. The photo lands with its context, next to the splits that explain the face you’re making in it.
What happens to your training data?
Skoma uses your Strava data to build your book or poster, and for nothing else. We never sell it or use it to train advertising models, and you can disconnect Strava at any time. Sharing is your choice: a private, read-only link that can expire after 7, 30 or 90 days, and that you can revoke. Shared route maps trim the exact start and finish. A run that starts at your front door says where your front door is.
No algorithms feeding on your training data, no ads, no dark patterns. Just a tool for turning the work into a memory.
Our founding note
The case for paper
A book on a table gets picked up, and a folder on a phone doesn’t. People who weren’t there open it: the friend who asks how the race went, the kid who wants to see the medal page. A hardcover also outlasts the app it came from. Skoma prints and binds it, and ships it free worldwide in about 7–14 business days. The longest version of the book even ends with two blank message-board pages for signatures from the people who got you to the start, which only works on paper.
If you have ideas for what Skoma should do next, we genuinely want them — tell us.