Strava, the fitness tracking app used by more than 120 million athletes around the world, is being used by a handful of hobbyists to create amazing works of art.
Canadian accountant Duncan McCabe is one of those choosing to do more than track how often he pounds the sidewalk on regular runs. McCabe is the creator of a viral video that has captured the attention of users on TikTok and X.
McCabe’s record of runs, which took place between January and October, and when stitched together depict a stick man dancing to Sofi Tukker’s “Purple Hat,” is a labor of love. Every single frame of the video—the second he’s produced, after a similar enterprise in 2023—involves McCabe running around 10 kilometers each day.
“I knew if I wanted to have the fluidity that I wanted, it would need to have at least 120 frames,” he tells Fast Company. “If there were fewer frames, it would just look jittery.”
McCabe’s wife gave him the idea of producing this year’s running video last Christmas. It took days of work to plan out to ensure it worked well. “I was just conceptualizing it, listening to the song, and thinking about what I might do,” he says. McCabe used PowerPoint to draw the broad outlines of where the lines would have to be to show the stick figure dancing in the way he wanted—and enabled him to plan out his daily running routes to ensure that, when combined, the top-down maps would animate in a way that hit the beats of the song he sought to capture.
McCabe isn’t alone in “hacking” Strava to depict artwork or cartoons using the line drawings created as the app’s GPS tracking system follows them on their workout. There’s a vibrant community of athletes who have chosen to use their run and bike tracking tools to make fun pictures. “I’ve got good admiration for many of the good pieces of Strava art out there,” he says, highlighting Mike Scott, another Torontonian, who sketched out an image of a beaver using cycle routes in 2022. One of the most famous Strava artists is cyclist Nico Georgiou, who creates intricate pieces created by biking across London. San Francisco native Jakub Kuba Mosur uses his bike rides to draw out bold messages, including exhortations to vote.
McCabe has been a bit shocked by the reactions: TikTok has been enthralled, while many on X have cried BS, saying McCabe had run diagonally across Toronto’s strictly delineated blocks—a physical impossibility. What users on X haven’t realized is that it’s possible to pause and restart tracking on Strava, which allows him to draw the intricate diagrams he’s depicted.
“The downside of that is any run that I go diagonally, I don’t get any credit for,” McCabe says. “So it might be a 12 kilometer run, but because I was pausing and unpausing for these corners, it only gives me credit for nine kilometers.”