Strava Art Project
Origins
Strava is an app that you can use to track activities like runs or bike rides and share them with your friends and teammates. I love running and have a secret (not secret at all and arguably completely obvious) obsession with Strava. During the pandemic, I had just finished a run when I was looking at the Strava map it made and I realized it vaguely resembled an octopus. I went on Google maps and found a few new running routes that would outline animals when I uploaded them to Strava. I wrote down directions and began to run, building up a collection of animal shaped runs around my town.
I actually wrote my college essay about this project because it really helped me find excitement in running again after going through things like injury and burn out. Now that I'm in college, I try to make Strava art whenever I have time, and even bring Cornell Running Club along for the journey.
Chickn Legs Contest
My polar bear shaped half marathon (if you guessed that I named it Half Bearathon and was way to proud of coming up with that name, you'd be correct) won a contest through one of my favorite running companies - Chickn Legs Running. It was exciting to see that Strava Art was an actual thing that many other people were doing, and how many run maps were out there already. I think the best part about it is that living in different areas gives you access to different shapes of roads and that really limits what you can make with a map and it forces you to be creative. So it can be really interesting to see maps that people make in different cities or to try to make map art when traveling to a new place.