My activity hasn't shown up in Trait – how long does the import take?

Once you've connected your watch or service to Trait, Trait fetches your activities automatically. Here we explain how that works, why it sometimes takes a while and what you can do if a session is missing.

The normal case: seconds to minutes

In at least 90% of cases, your activity is visible in Trait within seconds to a few minutes after you save it on your watch. The prerequisite is that the activity has arrived at your provider (e.g. Garmin Connect, Strava, Apple Health) – Trait only receives it from there.

The very first connection is a bit different: Trait does a one-time import of your activities from the last three months. That can take a moment.

Why it sometimes takes longer

Delays of a few minutes up to a few hours happen occasionally. Typical reasons:

• Your phone or watch had no internet connection when you saved the activity.
• Something went wrong when saving or uploading on the watch.
• Trait has reached its daily limit of requests to Strava or Garmin and has to wait. This mainly happens in the evening, when a particularly large number of runs arrive at the same time.

In these cases you don't need to do anything – the activity will catch up on its own. In the worst case it takes a day.

A quick check before you wait

The calendar in Trait uses a cache so it doesn't have to reload all sessions every time. Sometimes an activity is already there but isn't displayed yet. So close the app completely and reopen it. The session often shows up then.

After a day: the activity won't arrive anymore

Unfortunately, anything that isn't in Trait after a day won't arrive anymore. In that case something went wrong in the transfer between your provider and Trait, and Trait can't request the activity retroactively. We know that's annoying – but there's a simple way to make up for it:

Manually mark the planned workout as done in Trait. That way your plan knows the session took place, and the missing data is compensated for in the plan. If you'd like to assign a recorded run to a planned workout afterwards, that's a Pro feature.

Please don't reconnect right away

A single missing activity is no reason to disconnect and set up the connection again. Frequent reconnecting strains the connection and can lead to it not working at all at some point. Only if two to three sessions haven't arrived within about a week is something probably wrong with the connection. Details: Should I disconnect and reconnect?

Good to know

• Other sports (cycling, strength, swimming, etc.) are imported too and count towards your training load.
• Apple Watch: You don't need a specific watchOS to import your runs. watchOS 26 is only required for exporting planned workouts to the Watch.
• An activity you've deleted in Trait won't be imported again – see Can I re-import a deleted activity?
• If the same run arrives via two services, duplicates are created – see Why is an activity shown twice?