Not long after I met my boyfriend, I put a tracking device on him.
I didn’t quite mean to do that. What I did, really, was follow him on Strava, the GPS-powered social app that maps your workouts.
I was 23, and a nonexerciser who stayed fit with a precarious regimen of genetics. My new boyfriend was a talented triathlete whose values included pain tolerance. So I bought running shoes and joined Strava.
We were a long-distance couple, separated by a bland two-hour bus ride, but Strava was an idyllic eradicator of distance. On it, I followed the contours of his day, mapped around his workouts. When he slowed down for me, so we could run together, he appeared on Strava as my “one other,” in the app’s unintentionally sweet language for exercise partners. Over three years, our running maps came to describe a geography intelligible only to each other, a digital landscape of Strava routes that he’d named for me.
If that sounds like the modern denigration of romance incarnate, I don’t disagree. But back then I was too in love, and too busy exercising, to see that.
On Strava, I exercised with 27 million other people. I recruited my mom, and she lovingly left “kudos” under all my runs. But I suspect that most of what we share on social media is for one person — a deniable missive to someone we hope will choose us. I put runs on Strava for him. When I ran at desolate hours or in dispiriting weather, faster than yesterday, I hoped he would think that I was just as worthy as the other women whose willpower he admired with kudos.
We are all on Strava, I’m pretty sure, to better ourselves with our own data. But on Strava, self-improvement meets social media. There are lots of apps that make living performative and competitive, but Strava overachieves in recreating begrudged necessity — exercise — as enviable experience. A runner’s workout on Strava, with a title and photos, is a declaration of who she is and, maybe, who you should be too.
Everyone on Strava is running and biking and hanging out together without you. Everyone deserves that beer in their Strava title, that creamy coffee in their photo, more than you. Everyone is more virtuous than you…
