THE HELL OF STRAVA

Until the afternoon of June 25, 2020, I was blissfully unaware of the deep, black hole—the confidence-strangling, self-esteem-sucking abyss—known as Strava. A babe in the woods, one might say. Others might say I was a sixty-five-year-old life-support system for a shitty attitude and a sarcastic lifestyle, but to each his own diagnosis.

On that day—a date that will live in infamy, or at least mild ignominy—I was talking to a stranger about running at Crescent Lake Park in St. Petersburg, Florida.

In 20/20 hindsight, I should have been slightly suspicious. He was wearing a black fedora pulled low over his eyes, a black trench coat, and six watches on one wrist. He began the conversation with a hissing, “Pssssst. Hey, buddy. Got a minute?”

I answered with my standard poodle-like, Everybody is honest and I’m perpetually happy persona.

“Sure, dude. What’s up?”

“Yeah, man,” he began, shifting his eyes back and forth as if someone might come screaming out of the bushes at any moment and expose him for the dealer of heroin for fit and active people that he was. “Have you ever sssssseeen one of thesssse?”

With a small puff of smoke and the faint scent of sulfur, an iPhone appeared in his hand. The screen flashed to life, revealing a dark void filled with orange symbols, white letters, and several pictures—one of which looked suspiciously like a Trek Madone SLR 9 using a skull as a kickstand, surrounded by flames and a few lesser demons.

I could have sworn I heard a banshee screaming in the distance.

He told me of the promise of calculated effort, achievements, kilojoules, watts, and calories burned. He whispered low and seductively about accumulated statistics, projected progress, and the ability to monitor athletes all over the world so I could disregard those who made me look like a slacker and gloat over those who weren’t achieving the amazingly lofty, superhuman feats I soon imagined I was.

He promised that every time I started my sports watch, Strava would automatically inform the entire planet what an extraordinary specimen of human achievement I truly was.

Then, amid a billow of acrid black smoke and a sucking sound as the atmosphere rushed in to replace the space he had occupied, he vanished.

For a split second.

Then his mouth, coal-black Van Dyke, and bifurcated tongue reappeared, floating on the soft, humid breeze.

“Remember,” the mouth said. “If it ain’t on Strava, it didn’t happen.”

Then, with the pop of a champagne cork, it disappeared.

I was aghast at best and mildly perturbed at worst.

Had everything that happened during the first sixty-five years of my existence never actually occurred? Had I played football in high school? Had I ever made love to a woman, watched a sunset, or tasted a perfect wine?

None of that shit had been on Strava because Strava didn’t exist back then.

And what about everything I did after 2009, when Strava did exist but I was unaware of it? Had those eleven years merely been a dream? Was my life some kind of Dallas-style shower scene in which all the highs and lows were suddenly erased because the audience didn’t like the previous season?

I immediately downloaded the Strava app, connected it to everything I owned—from my sports watch to my toilet—and ventured forth into the world as a real, live boy.

There was no turning back.

Oh, I was hooked, gentle reader, and I was hooked badly.

Soon, my life declined into a hell in which I would frantically scratch at my bare wrist because I had forgotten to put on my watch, meaning no one would ever know that I had walked from the bedroom to the bathroom for my morning offload. That effort was gone forever. Unrecorded. Unrecognized. A bowel movement without witnesses.

Did it even happen?

I became a slave to that hateful phrase that occasionally flashed across my screen:

YOU ARE A LOCAL LEGEND!

Wonderful. Now that I was a Local Legend, I would have to run or ride my genitals into the thick loam of the earth to defend my title against all challengers, regardless of age, sex, athletic ability, or whether they were cheating little shitheads riding e-bikes.

Strava means strive in Swedish, which should make it sträva, but I assume those two little dots were too expensive to reproduce. In several other languages, it translates roughly to clinical psychosis with excellent cardiovascular health.

At first, my Strava use was controllable. I could quit anytime I wanted. It wasn’t like I was addicted or anything.

That would be crazy talk.

I recorded all my bike rides, and Strava’s syrupy-sweet “Athlete Intelligence” would praise my amazing ability to ride around the block nonstop—sometimes twice in the same week.

I suppose I should have been grateful that, after the words Athlete Intelligence, it didn’t say, File not found.

When I started running, Strava was all sunshine, rainbows, and marshmallow Peeps.

Athlete Intelligence: Look at you, Corky, all running and shit! Nice job. I’ll remember this in the future. Trust me.

Strava is what forced me into the Fartlek method of training. It isn’t what it sounds like, although I did once see a video like that on the internet—and something disturbingly similar performed live onstage in Tijuana during the early seventies.

Fartlek is, of course, Swedish. Damn those meddling Swedes to hell.

In very, very simple terms, Fartlek training means you run or bike hard until you’re fatigued, slow down until you recover, and then pick up the pace again. Like with Fartlek Strava's position is that whatever distance or speed you reach immediately becomes your new minimum acceptable standard for the rest of your natural life.

Strava forces you into it.

First run:

Hey, great job!

Second run:

Yeah, okay, but you’ve already done this.

Every identical run after that:

How long are you planning to screw around like this?

It’s a virtual hamster wheel, except the hamster is seventy years old, has arthritis, and is checking his heart rate while being mocked by an algorithm.

I had to keep moving and improving lest the world discover that I was a quitter—or, even worse, a slacker. All I had to see from the digital harbinger of my insanity was, Less effort today than your usual rides, and I would go straight back outside and grind another workout into the ground.

When I returned, stopped my watch, and opened the Strava app with shaking hands, all I needed to see was:

You crushed your run today.

I would lean my head back, close my eyes, and smile like a strung-out junkie who had just pushed down the plunger.

Another thing my abuser, Strava, enjoyed doing was gaslighting me with offhanded compliments.

Nice, steady work today. You stayed in your comfort zone. Good recovery workout.

DUDE!

The heat index was 105. I lost forty percent of my body weight through perspiration. My running shorts fell off because my hips could no longer support them, and I was hit by a car at the halfway point, but still finished before I went to the ER and was put in a full body cast.

All of that earns me a pat on the head and an I guess that’ll do?

I began editing my Athlete Intelligence summaries with comments like, Yeah, but it was hot, and, You know I’m just getting over COVID, right?

Once, I added, Hey, my dog just died! Let’s see you perform under that kind of grief, you smug orange bastard.

Then the worst of the worst happened.

Someone gave me kudos.

Sad-face emoji. Black-cloud emoji. Tiny coffin emoji.

Somebody out there was watching me. Someone knew what I was doing.

I couldn’t slack off now. My public would be sooooooo disappointed.

The second nail in that coffin came when another person followed me.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I began doing insane things: run a half marathon on Monday, ride ten miles at a twenty-mile-per-hour average on Tuesday, run a 5K on Wednesday, complete a forty-plus-mile ride on Thursday, and finish the week with a six-hundred-meter swim on Friday.

All it took was one entire week of that with no kudos and no new followers, and I branded myself a failure. I pledged to my adoring public that I would do better tomorrow, then donned my hair shirt and spent half an hour engaged in self-flagellation—the kind involving coarse rope, not the other, more entertaining variety.

I dropped from 175 pounds to 164 without even trying.

At six-foot-three, that was becoming something of an issue. I began turning sideways and disappearing.

Then I hit rock bottom.

After my normal week of self-abuse designed to please an emotionally abusive app, I rode my bike to the local grocery store and back. I was out of margarita mix and little paper umbrellas, so this was clearly a medically necessary trip.

Naturally, I started my watch when I left and saved the activity when I returned. Otherwise, it would have never happened, and I would still be out of margarita mix, paper umbrellas and filled with a deep unrelenting sadness.

The next day, I wanted to ride around the neighborhood and relax. Once again, I started my watch and saved the ride.

Of course, Strava informed me that I was a worthless subhuman because I had failed to live up to my full potential. But as I was giving my phone the finger, I noticed an addendum to my Athlete Intelligence:

Great job on your seventh straight day of activity.

I stared at it.

Do I get a pat on the back just for never stopping?

Apparently, yes.

Like trying to appease an insecure and controlling father, that was all it took to drive me deeper into the abyss of cardiovascular insanity.

I told Christy, “Hey, I’ve gone seven straight days on Strava.”

Her response should have told me everything.

“Good?”

I lasted fourteen days and received absolutely no acknowledgment from my loving public for being so diligently consistent in appeasing the Swedish god of self-abuse.

How dare they?

On the fifteenth day, I decided I would show those ungrateful bastards.

I wouldn’t work out at all.

By the end of that day, I was curled into a trembling fetal ball in the corner, my eyes the size of a Chihuahua’s after five tabs of speed.

It was over.

All fourteen days of effort had gone up in smoke, just like that. My streak was dead. My followers had abandoned me. Sponsors who had never heard of me were surely canceling contracts they had never offered. Somewhere in Sweden, a software engineer looked at a screen, shook his head, and whispered, “Pathetic.”

I learned a valuable lesson that day:

If you didn’t do it, it's still on Strava.

There is no happy ending to this story.

I remain hopelessly adrift in an ocean of similarly degenerate athletes, all of us staring late into the night at the black-and-orange glow of the Strava app beneath our blankets so no one can see the lowlife addicts we have become.

The only advice I can offer the sane and well-adjusted world is this:

If anyone approaches you and says, “Hey, are you on Strava?” call them out for the heretic they are. Then begin gathering stones into a basket so you can eradicate this stain from society before it records another recovery ride and has the audacity to call it unproductive.