Why Nike is no longer supported by RunGap and how to get your data anyway.

For more than 10 years, RunGap has helped users of Nike apps to recover their workout data otherwise locked up on Nike’s servers. We do not have accurate numbers for the entire period – but based on the last few years we estimate that a total of close to 50 million completed workouts have been retrieved from Nike’s servers by our users.

The very last workout was fetched on March 20th 2024 and all Nike support was finally removed starting with RunGap version 2.117.

Here is a brief summary of what happened and what to do next if you care about your workout data and want to regain control of it.

Some say that the Nike+ ecosystem is modelled after North Korea. Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that it is an extremely closed system and to this day Nike does not offer individuals any way to download their hard-earned workout data. Neither do Nike provide third party developers access to their APIs so that data can be transferred freely from Nike to other services.

This means that RunGap and similar apps and services have had to rely on undocumented and unsupported methods in order to help you fetch your data from Nike’s servers.

10 years ago, many apps were using an unofficial Nike API that was published by independent developers in various places on the internet and at that point we even had a friendly dialog with Nike’s Director, Business Development and Partnerships about getting access to the next version of their API.

Unfortunately, this person left Nike and we were told to reach out to [e-mail] instead. It remains unclear if anyone were actually reading emails sent to that account or if they just could not be bothered to answer – but after numerous unanswered emails over a long period, we finally gave up contacting Nike and simply continued using the unofficial API.

So, we were pleasantly surprised when out of the blue, this email popped up in our inbox:

Quickly we signed up to get access to their new API and during the next 3 months we put a lot of effort into integration the new, friendly Nike with RunGap. The API was sort of half-baked at that point and poorly documented – so this was actually more work than one would expect.

When we finally were ready to release the new version on the App Store, we reached out to Ken and asked for Nike’s approval to publish it.

The response from Ken was complete silence for six long weeks where he simply could not be bothered to answer any of our emails and when the fine gentleman finally responded, this is what we received:

A response fitting for a company with a long history of unethical business practices.

So, we immediately terminated our agreement with Nike, scrapped all our recent work and went back to using the unofficial API.

In 2020 Nike blocked RunGap and other apps from using this unofficial API and when we finally managed to work around this, we simultaneously announced that we would keep it running for the time being – but not fix it in case it should break again.

In March 2024 Nike decided to block apps using this API again and because of this the integration is now gone for good. 

To the best of my knowledge, no one is able to fetch historic workout data from Nike at this point and all your data is now locked away on their servers.

What to do next?

In late 2023 Nike added the ability to send newly completed workouts to Strava. This seems to work OK and if you absolutely have to use their apps, we highly recommend that you create a free Strava account and configure the Nike app to automatically send new workouts to Strava. This way you can at least get to your new workouts via Strava and keep a copy safe in RunGap.

For the record, the Nike Run Club App can be configured to automatically write completed workouts to Apple Health as well – but it will only write summary data plus heart rate, distance and energy consumption. Other important data such as GPS maps are completely missing. So, to no surprise, it is pretty useless.

Getting your historic workouts requires a bit more work. Unlike most other companies, Nike has absolutely no way to export your data and you will need to contact them via this form and ask to get a copy of ALL your personal workout data in a suitable machine readable format such as FIT or TCX with reference to your rights under GDPR.

We tried this and at first, they responded with a small PDF with just a single line summary for some – but far from all – of our workouts. There was no way to respond to this, so we had to fill out the form once more and explain that we only received a brief summary of some of our data and make clear that we wanted ALL our data and in a suitable format. After some weeks we finally received a ZIP file with a TCX file for each workout.

For no apparent reason, many of these TCX files do not have the type of workout properly recorded as part of the standard TCX data – but it is included in proprietary Nike format instead.
RunGap version 2.118 and later will detect this and set the workout type correctly.

Also, we noticed that the 1795 TCX files that we received all have elevation and cadence values replaced by dummy values of 100 meters and 160 SPM. We have therefore asked for our data a third time and stressed that we want all the data including elevation and cadence.

Update  June 25, 2024: Nike appears to have fixed the issue with dummy elevation and cadence values - but several users have received TCX files with garbled distance values, where the total distance covered is going backwards over time. Since Nike is unable to understand the issue or cannot be bothered to fix it, RunGap version 2.122 and later will silently repair these files by recalculating distance from the GPS data.

You can easily bulk import all the TCX files to RunGap using either iCloud Drive or DropBox and then you have copies safely stored in RunGap.

No need to say, we highly recommend that you start looking for an alternative solution that does not imprison your data like Nike does. There are plenty to choose from.

If you for some reason still want your new workouts to go to Nike Run Club after switching to a better alternative, you can set up a free Polar Flow account and link it to your Nike account. You can then use RunGap to send your new workouts to Polar Flow which in turn will send them to Nike.

Just don't do it!