A marathon build is four months of small decisions — the 5am alarms, the long runs that went sideways, the week everything clicked. By race day it lives as a thousand grey rows in an app. Beautiful in aggregate, forgettable one screen at a time.
A photobook fixes that. Not a data dump — a narrative. Here’s the shape we’ve found works best, and how Skoma assembles most of it for you automatically.
Start with the arc, not the data
Every training block has three acts: base, build, and taper. Let those be your chapters. The numbers support the story; they aren’t the story.
- Base — the quiet months. Easy miles, consistency, the unglamorous foundation.
- Build — the work. Peak week, the longest run, the workouts that scared you.
- Taper — the wind-down. Less volume, more nerves, the calm before the start line.
When you build a book, Skoma pulls your Strava history and lays this out as monthly spreads automatically — volume, calendars, your standout sessions — so you’re editing a draft, not staring at a blank page.
In the default recipe, every month of the block gets four pages. One holds that month’s numbers, one is a calendar of the days you ran, and two are for the month’s photos. A sixteen-week build therefore opens with about sixteen pages of training before race week starts. Strava brings in the distance, time, elevation, pace and route of each run, plus the photos you attached to them. Runs logged somewhere else can be added by hand.
Which kind of book should you make?
Pick the recipe by what you have more of: photos or numbers. Skoma offers three for a race book. Complete Story is the full arc: training months, race week, race day and the days after. Photo Memoir leads with photos and big captions and keeps the data light, so it works best if you have pictures to add. Training Log is the dense one, with charts, calendars and every split, and photos only on the covers.
You choose the recipe once, at the start. Themes are separate from it, so any recipe can wear any of the six themes, and a theme change restyles the whole book in one go.
Let the milestones breathe
One number per page beats ten. The longest run deserves its own spread. So does peak week. Give your proudest stats room and they read like a magazine, not a spreadsheet.
Skoma already gives those two their own pages: Longest Training Run and Peak Week. For the rest, the page layouts decide how much room each moment gets. Full Page hands one photo the whole page. Two Columns, a 2×2 Grid or a Mosaic suit a weekend of race-week pictures. Filmstrip works for a sequence, like the last kilometre in five frames.
The book isn’t a record of the data. It’s a record of the person the training made you.
What goes in the race-week pages?
The days around the race get more pages than any single training month. In Complete Story, race week runs from the expo, with one page of details and one of photos, to the day before and a page for your kit. Race day itself gets a page for the finish time and a race-day letter drafted from your race stats, which you can rewrite. A stats page and the route map follow. After that come the photo galleries, a page for the bib, and two pages for the day after.
Save the last word for race day
The finish-line photo, your chip time, the route you ran — these are the payoff. Put them near the end, full-bleed, and let everything before them build toward the moment.
Leave room for the people, too. Complete Story closes with two message-board pages meant for signatures from whoever supported the build: the partner who covered the school run, the friend who paced the last long run. Hand the printed book round before it goes on the shelf.
What does a printed book cost?
Building and editing the book is free; you pay only when you order the printed hardcover. In the US it starts at $49.99, which covers up to 50 pages, and each page beyond that adds $0.99. Books come in landscape, portrait or square. Shipping is free worldwide, and a book arrives in about 7–14 business days.
Before you print, you can send a private, read-only link to the people who ran the long runs with you. The link can expire after 7, 30 or 90 days, or never, and you can revoke it. Shared route maps trim the exact start and finish, so a link doesn’t give away where you live.
The first draft builds itself from your Strava history. The editing is where it becomes yours: swap the photos, rewrite the captions, cut the week you would rather forget.