I Gave Claude Access to My Strava — Here's How I Built It

I've been using Strava for years to track my runs and rides. The data's all there — pace, heart rate, elevation, splits — but actually getting insight out of it always felt like work. You're clicking around dashboards, mentally comparing numbers, trying to spot trends. Then I started wondering: what if I could just ask Claude about my workouts? In plain English. No dashboards, no clicking. Just "how has my pace improved over the last month?" and get a real answer. Turns out you can. And building it taught me more about how AI tools actually work than anything I'd read before. Here's how I did it. First, What Even Is an MCP Server? Before I get into the code, let me explain MCP — because when I first heard it I had no idea what it meant either. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It's a standard that Anthropic created so that AI models like Claude can talk to the outside world in a consistent way. Think of it like this. Claude on its own is incredibly smart, but it only knows what's