Amateur athletes are fiddling their data — from deleting bad times to catching a bus. What happens when they get caught out, asks Duncan Craig. When Laura Green headed off on her honeymoon she had only one vigorous activity in mind.
Green and her husband, Connor, were celebrating in Mammoth Lakes, California — where, as Green knew, a friend held the record on the tracker app Strava for running a particular downhill stretch of a mountain trail the quickest. So, with Connor in tow, she spent the best part of a day seeking out this friend’s route, attempting to beat their time — and then wrestling with wi-fi and data-transfer issues in her hotel room to upload the successful run from her watch to the app. “It’s still so embarrassing to admit,” the 38-year-old says.
“That was my honeymoon!” The actions of Green — a Boston-based running influencer with more than 200,000 Instagram followers, who gently sends up herself and her sport — is a vivid example of how the world’s best-known activity-tracking platform can feed obsessive tendencies. But while Green won’t let her obsession twist into outright deception, plenty of other users are crossing the line, and in ever more elaborate ways. “If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen” is the motto of the hardcore Stravites.
Seemingly, if it’s on Strava it also potentially didn’t happen. Or, as Gary House, a Wrexham-based running coach puts it: “There are two types of runners. Ones that cheat on Strav.
