A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering

I've had accounts on both Garmin Connect and Strava for several years, but it's been ages since I actually used a GPS watch -- something I've never done consistently anyway -- and I've used my profiles almost exclusively to keep track of other people's training for both professional and recreational purposes. To the extent that I've used either interface to keep track of my own running, I've usually just entered the data manually.

It's possible that what I am doing these days constitutes training and not just therapy. I say this because even though entering a race would be a misguided idea for me now and at any imaginable time in the future, I'm probably between 50 and 75 percent certain of doing so anyway within the lifetimes of almost everyone reading this. Maybe even all of you.

As a result, I like to time myself over known distances from time to time, in the same way I like to troll blogs perpetrated by abject morons -- i.e., I don't get any real benefit from it and I'm often more disappointed than gratified after it's over, but I still keep fucking doing it. Until a few weeks ago, however, I could not do this with any precision unless I was either on a track or puttering along one of the numerous sections of paved rec paths that have been wheeled and marked off at regular intervals.

Then I decided to download the Strava app for Android. Why? Because I wanted to be embraced by a supportive community of longtime friends and "friends," and embrace it in return. Or maybe I really wanted the cheap and bizarre psychological payoff I get from tracking and timing my runs with great precision, uploading these to the Web, and continually castigating and denigrating my efforts in a quasi-public forum. I wanted, in effect, to walk into a party and start punching myself in the groin.

Most people wouldn't want to run with a phone in their hand. I'm used to this because I almost always listen to music when I run alone, and all but about two of my runs each week, if that, are solo affairs. But I don't like to listen to music when I am running hard, which introduced a Catch-22 because the only runs that I really care to track with Strava are my harder efforts.

One unique, ingenious, and diabolical feature of Strava is that it allows users to upload "segments," which are simply stretches of road or trail users cover in training, usually on a regular basis. These can be as short or as long as the user likes. More to the point, if you happen to cover a segment that other Strava users have covered, the app will tell you this and will even rank you in comparison to everyone else who has submitted their own data to the Strava pool.

This means that, during a run, you could be a few miles in and pass a seemingly random dead body on the side of the road, and then pass an equally nondescript covey of prostitutes ten minutes later, only to learn after you get home and look at your data that in those ten minutes, you covered the "Corpse to Whores along Arapahoe" segment that some enterprising user created three years earlier. You might also learn that your pace for this 1.46-mile segment was 6:51 per mile, and that this ranks you 71 out of 458 total users, and 6th for the week, month, or year, or in your own gender or age group.

Even if you're not familiar with Strava, you can probably understand the kind of mess this has the potential to create in the mind of someone who really just wants to log easy, no-pressure mileage but is just competitive enough to pick up the pace for no useful reason at all, even if the weather is atrocious or he's operating on next to no sleep or ran up a mountain the day before.

I was going to use a crude analogy about using a tool like Strava in a runner haven like Boulder: it's a lot like wandering around naked in a men's locker room populated chiefly by porn stars. But the person I volunteered this idea to told me I should avoid it, given my obvious unfamiliarity with porn. So I'll go with, it's a lot like taking an essay-writing seminar with Christopher Hitchens, George Will, Maureen Dowd and John Irving as classmates. I've done one or two segments covering up to two miles at or just below six-minute pace, which was not all-out but still constitutes work, and the number of people who train in Boulder who run at this speed almost every day is nontrivial. It is thus tempting -- just as the fuckers who developed this app knew it would be -- to try to "beat" runners like Kara Goucher, Sage Canaday, and Neely Spence Gracey, even when that's not actually happening, they will never know about it, and they probably weren't even trying very hard when their own segments were recorded anyway.

I could go into a lot more, but because this is a blog post and not a piece I'm being paid to write, I can just kind of peace out and abandon the narrative right here, when I might be getting ready to tell a good story. But I'll end with this: I love the shapes of the runs. Yours, mine, all of them. I see clear resemblances to animals, states and countries, and people performing a variety of acts both benign and lewd. Once, on someone else's profile, I saw Alfred E. Neuman trying to touch his toes. my whole engagement in Strava is like an ongoing Rorschach test.

Anyway, a few examples. This was from yesterday and proves that I can currently run under 8:00 pace for an hour at altitude and live to describe it.



Here I take a stab at a pun, based on local street nomenclature.



This one was a tempo run with strides because, when you think about it, all runs are.



And this, well...



(You can elect to follow me on Strava if you want. I only record and upload about half of my mileage, if that. Also, points to anyone who knew right away what the title of this post is paying homage to.)