Olympian Map-Art

Strava, and the likes

Ever increasing numbers of sporty types take both training guidance and simple pleasure from recording their work-outs on GPS based watches or other devices and then analyzing their uploaded performance data on websites such as Strava. And then these sporty types start to share their exercise data with their ‘followers’ on Strava, giving each other comments and thumbs-up ‘kudos’ signs comparable to the ‘likes’ of Facebook. It’s becoming a maxim among the more serious exercise sloggers that a workout ‘didn’t happen unless it’s on Strava’ and I have to admit that poring over my Strava running stats, while also keeping a friendly eye on how my followers are doing, has become an established part of the cooling down part of each training session. But among the most serious athletes, Strava data tends not to be shared, to avoid athletic espionage around training practices, performance levels and readiness levels for upcoming competitions. 

Athletic maps

The data recorded on Strava includes a map of your activity route, whether it was walking, running, cycling, swimming or even ‘COVID-19 activities’ such as trampolining with your children (the latter maps tend to be a bit crazy looking). And then there’s detailed performance data to look at, including your distance covered, pace and heart rate.

But being a lifelong cartophile, it’s the maps that interest me most. Many runners are creatures of habit, so they tend to beat out the same routes and resultant Strava maps week in and week out. I’ve alluded in a previous blog to the 5 kilometre (quite misshapen and askew) bow-tie shaped route between Ballina and Killaloe that is my most well trodden path, although my COVID-19 travel restricted maps of recent days are slightly different and by necessity all within two kilometres of home. 

My most commonly trodden Strava map - a 5 km, quite askew bow-tie 
between Ballina and Killaloe

In more normal times of international travel it’s nice to see the exotic maps generated by friends while on holiday or travelling for work, such as one Strava friend who travels all over Europe, China and the United States, thus giving the rest of us the virtual vicariousness of international running routes. And of course there are those very special personal Strava maps, produced from my first few morning runs with my children, maps that I hope to show them in years to come, like the athletic equivalent of baby photos.

And then there are the novelty Strava maps that people have started to produce in recent years. They vary from the sublime to the bizarre, with people tracing out on their runs and cycles various shapes and characters, sometimes of very impressive complexity and quality. I have a few examples below. The Canadian cyclist Stephen Lund has become something of an athlete-artist, going to great lengths (literally) to cycle-sketch his way across the country and earning himself the artistic sobriquet 'Cycleangelo'. And of course whenever there’s the opportunity to draw genitals, people will gladly have a go, so you can google plenty of pornographic Strava maps.

Two of 'Cycleangelo's' creations:

And then here's a political one from the UK, relating to that thing that was in the news all the time before COVID-19 (this took 40 miles of running by Nathan Rae and is entitled 'Goodbye friend, I will miss EU'):

Then helicoptering above the individual maps and combining the maps of multiple individuals and populations produces Strava heat maps, and this is where it gets really impressive. Of course the paranoid part of my brain thinks of the many nefarious uses for such data (e.g. it’s possible to pick out military training bases and the activities of the occupants) but to me these national and international level heat maps present beautiful and at times poignant images of human activity and endeavour, while also highlighting the vast cultural, ideological and wealth disparities of our planet.

So a look at the whole world picture shows that the wealthy Europeans and North Americans light up the world, because we can afford to burn calories on mere exercise and we can buy GPS watches and computers to analyse our exertions. Meanwhile, although the continent has produced more champion runners than anywhere else for my whole lifetime, Africa remains the dark continent, in Strava terms.  And then there’s those clear differences that can be evident because of a stark ideological divide between neighbouring nations, such as that between the two Koreas. 

A picture paints a thousand words, as does this Strava heat map, highlighting vast differences in wealth and human behaviour 

The two Koreas, with '38th parallel' levels of division as demonstrated 

by this Strava heat map 

Olympic Map-Art

So finally, all this thinking about athletics and maps brings me back to an idea alluded to in the last blog, that of Olympian art:
https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/03/olympian-warfare-art-and-tipperary.html

It was a wish of Baron de Coubertin himself that art be included in the Olympics (perhaps inspired by his own father, who was an artist) and this was the case from 1912 to 1948, with competing entries required to have a sporting theme. And with the Tokyo 2020 Olympics now deferred, wouldn’t it be nice to have a Strava-map based Olympics athletics/art competition? 

GPS watch manufacturers could get in on the game and help out by distributing watches to less well off nations at low cost. Strava and similar data analysts could help in the collation, presentation and analysis of data. And there could be an endless number of competition categories, based on the type of work-out (running, cycling, etc.), individual and team efforts and entries could be judged based on athletic parameters such as pace and distance covered along with, as per the wish of Baron de Coubertin, their artistic merit. And for amateur athletes of advancing age, such as myself, it might finally give me an outside chance at Olympic gold for Ireland.

Baron de Coubertin (1863 - 1937) 
French founder of the International Olympic Committee and generally regarded as the father of the modern Olympic games