On geo-privacy, Strava, and safety

Runners' widespread convention of broadcasting their precise locations is an aberration and a longstanding curiosity

A 34-year-old runner and schoolteacher was abducted and murdered early on Friday morning near her home in Memphis. The suspect is in custody and can only be described as a lifelong violent fuck-up.

Although it’s unlikely that this aggressor targeted his victim via information gleaned from her Strava or Garmin Connect accounts, the gruesome event has rekindled discussions among runners that started in April after Molly Seidel reported having experienced serial crowd-stalking—“people showing up to her runs and followers determining where she lives based on her activity,” according to Taylor Dutch’s Runner’s World story in early June. That prompted Seidel to stop making her runs viewable to the public, and it resulted in a spate of similar accounts from rank-and-file women runners who had undergone various forms of harassment or otherwise felt uncomfortable as a direct result of geolocation data they uploaded to Strava.

When RW reached out to Strava, their response included the following claim:

We care deeply about athlete safety and fully support athletes using privacy and map visibility controls to customize how they share information and tell their story.

Strava cares deeply about nothing besides cultivating and retaining subscribers, which it’s currently doing by massaging and milking the most sham and ribald aspects of Wokish culture to maximum effect. But on the privacy front, in fact, just over a year ago, Strava announced that it was granting users more control by allowing them to keep the first and last mile of a run (or ride) hidden, thereby masking their starting and finishing point(s). The company also introduced the option to hide the entire map of a run, but this selection comes at the cost of not being able to have any portions of these jaunts count toward “Strava segment” leaderboards. Although not one person on Earth should consider any of those leaderboards important, thousands do.

It doesn’t take natural empathy with a criminal mastermind to grasp that someone intent on creepily greeting, covertly chasing on foot, or outright accosting someone in mid-run doesn’t need to know the runner’s entire route in order to pick one or more points from which to attack. The only good option among those Strava provides is to hide the whole map. If you do that, you lose a big part of the Strava experience, and it’s unclear if you can bulk-edit your activities in way that hides all past maps.

If you use Strava, the only way you can ensure that no one knows where you’re running is to manually approve each of your prospective followers. This is easy to do, but runners are as prone as anyone else to succumbing to the allure of growing large followings of random yutzes who reliably hit the “like” button, often without noticing a single detail about the run.

I’ve mentioned before that on the personal Web site I deleted last year after over twenty years of devoted service, I maintained an “Odometer” page in the years I was routinely racking up triple-digit mileage weeks. Because this was before social media and GPS watches for all, I just updated the page in Notepad every few days and uploaded it to my site via an FTP client.

Back then, few people maintained personal Web pages of any sort, let alone sites dedicated to distance running. So, as funny as it sounds today, someone publicly posting a training log was something of a novelty, especially someone who was obviously overtraining at times and doubling down at such times on it with self-castigating snark on my Race Reports page (by then not as much of a novelty as the Odometer page, but in the conversation) and even more bombastic nonsense on the site’s message board, known as “A Donnybrook of Overstated Jibber-Jabber.”

This is a screen shot from beyond the Internet grave, showing my training in the first two weeks of 2002. (I was a bawling, spread-legged mileage whore in those days, but these two weeks nevertheless represent borderline-atypical totals. I averaged about 103 miles for the year, in which I remained injury-free but missed about three weeks owing to a robust drinking binge in the Blue Ridge.)

I stopped doing this in 2003, and in 2004 set most of my lifetime personal bests. I have revived the habit in some form multiple times over the years, usually by working my totals into blog posts. But while I maintain Strava and Garmin Connect accounts so I can track the training of the runners I coach, I use one of my porn names on one site and a fake one on the other and rarely upload my runs. I’ve probably run close to 2,000 miles this year, but have direct electronic proof of about 1 percent of that.

I’ve therefore progressed from being one of ten daily runners who uploads his training to the Internet to being among the small minority of people—probably more than ten, but this can’t be verified—who don’t.

Strava has baited a wide array of psychological hooks, and its principals know as well as any other social-media operatives how to keep people reliant on the platform. But if you’re genuinely worried about privacy, yet intent on letting people know the details of your runs—and I understand the value of this to a lot of people—then I suggest not uploading anything to Strava and simply using a different free platform to provide the slurry of numerical details, like Blogspot…or Substack!

For example, New Hampshire native Patrick Moulton, a tireless worker who was the top runner in the state for Pelham High School when I was coaching at Bishop Brady, uses Blogspot for this purpose in the most basic way. (Based on these bare, details-free totals, you might be surprised at how fast this guy has run.)

Yes, it’s a little more work going this route, because you have to type stuff that would otherwise show up automatically. And if you abstain from Strava outright, the nice (if repetitive) pics and the gushing (if mindless) kudos, you will feel as if you have quit something edifying and necessary. But if you often run with the same people you follow on Strava, then what’s the real loss if you withdraw from full-on participation in a worldwide festival of mutual niche-activity backslapping—even if you’re not worried about being stalked? (Answer: If I do a run and don’t announce it, it didn’t fully happen somehow. Duh!)

Of course, all of this talk about Strava options is a proxy for the real concern here, which is that solo runners, almost always women, can be attacked with no warning at any time virtually regardless of where they are. The assailant may make an impulse decision to attack that has nothing to do with a runner’s identity or home base and everything to do with her perceived vulnerability.

I almost never worry that I might be attacked while running, but I do think about it, in large part because I do a lot of running in the dark. I wouldn’t exactly call this complacency, but most people can tell that I am unlikely to be carrying anything of value, that I can probably escape, and that if nothing else I am probably going to fight back and do more damage than the assailant is willing to endure for the possibility of extracting a credit card hidden in a sock. I also have a standing plan to gouge any attacker’s eye out with the business end of the car key that is often projecting from between my knuckles, then calmly lick the jelly-like substance from the key and blow on it while fixing the downed fucker with a steely glare, like Clint Eastwood would do.

If someone just wants to jump out of the woods and shoot me because I was there, or a gang of rogue Mormons decides to go full Deliverance on me on the banks of Boulder Creek, then I won’t be able to do fuck-all about it, so I waste little time pondering such extreme scenarios.

The side of this that I fail to consider, being harmless at heart, is that I myself am probably often perceived on sight a threat to solo women runners approaching from the other direction, especially on a narrow path and in particular after dusk. I’ve always assumed that if I’m running myself during these encounters, this provides automatic assurance to women runners that I’m not a threat. But if any of these women have had or merely heard about frightening Strava-rooted experiences, then me being a runner only makes things worse.

I also don’t consider myself physically imposing. But I dwarf a 5’ 4”, 105-pound woman to the same extent a 6’ 4”, 210-pound male dwarfs me, and even though women live in a world rife with humans far larger than themselves, just the sight of a standard adult man who appears remotely physically capable is likely unnerving in a lot of settings. Maybe only for a few seconds, if that. But it’s a pisser to consider how much anxiety all of these micro-evaluations add up to over the course of a runner’s lifetime.

I know one woman in rural Massachusetts who occasionally runs with a .22-caliber pistol or snub-nose pop-gun when it’s cold enough to justify wearing the kind of top that makes running with a concealed firearm feasible. She has a permit to carry. For a variety of obvious reasons, however, this is both inconvenient and dispiriting, although if you point a gun at a couple of mean-looking yahoos in a slowly moving truck, the yahoos and their truck will be far up the (probably dirt) road.

If you crawl the Internet and wallow around on the kind of sites run by grizzled maniacs with massive, dusty stacks of Soldier of Fortune magazines located behind the flaccid blow-up dolls in their basements, you can purchase taser-like devices that cannot possibly be legal anywhere except in portions of Kiev, but are better than guns. You can also run with a blade. If you choose to arm yourself with a knife, many of which are also illegal, it is vital to gain instruction from an experienced source in defending yourself with one. Such people don’t openly advertise their skills, but I would recommend talking to anyone who has been a non-commissioned officer in the United States Marines. He’ll know a guy who’s been to places like Panama or Kandahar.