Strava’s GPS tracking feature is so much fun—especially when you forget that it’s on. Yesterday, I turned on Strava for the walk to the park, and then forgot to pause the tracking while at the playground. The end result is this fun scribble-all-over animation (video on YouTube):
All these squiggly lines capture us chasing a four-year-old and one-year-old around a playground for 15 minutes. Although Strava didn’t capture me pushing the roundabout in circles. That would have made a cool pattern. Maybe I needed to push it for a longer time.
The elevation tracker recorded the time when I climbed up the quasi-rock-wall-thing.

On my birthday last year I rode my bicycle in repeated circles doing donuts in a parking lot.

That was also a lot of fun. Of course, there are people who take this to a whole new level by drawing things with their Strava GPS. Someday I’ll write up a bunch of ideas. In the meantime, here’s a few: Walk every street in your neighborhood (the result is kinda cool), spell words, draw pictures. There’s gotta be more.
There are two ladies in Peoria who are documenting their walks with an app like this, and also taking photos along the way. After they come home, they research what they’ve seen with a librarian for quick facts. It’s been so engaging to follow their walks and learn about the central town responsible for all our smaller satellite communities: https://www.facebook.com/pedestriansinpeoria
What a wonderful project! I love their combination of photos for every walk. They do a great job of capturing fun quirky things. And then it’s not just quirky things, they include themselves in some of the photos to give a feeling of humanity. Then the screenshot of the map is a nice finishing touch to get a feel of the area they walked. I’m following their Page. This is such a great project during the pandemic (and can continue to be a project after the pandemic—if there’s ever an “after”).