“If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen” is the motto of the hardcore Stravites. Photo / Getty Images
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 Strava, and liars.”
Subterfuge ranges from the brazen — cycled runs, doctored GPS data, device swapping with a quicker partner to pass their activities off as your own — to the “lower-end stuff, which I see as a bit of fun”, House says. This might include waiting for a freakishly strong tailwind to attempt a prized segment, cropping a slower start or end of a run to make it look more impressive, or corralling friends into “drafting” you — a technique used in running or cycling in which you conserve energy by sitting in someone else’s slipstream — to smash your personal best and stockpile “kudos” (Strava’s currency — similar to likes on Instagram).
Strava is a juggernaut. It was launched in 2009, initially as a running and cycling tracker, although you can now log more than 30 activities on the platform, including swimming, skiing and in-line skating. In 2023 it was estimated to have as many as 120 million users.
Cycling, the second most popular activity on the platform behind running, offers even more scope for duplicity. Recording your ride in a car. Using an ebike. Accidentally on purpose failing to turn your GPS watch off before the post-ride drive home. Strava, helpfully, provides a few more ideas via its guidelines. “Keep rides with a mixed-gender tandem bike off leaderboards,” it urges. “Hide motor-paced rides (cycling behind a vehicle) from leaderboards.”
Topping these online lists is Strava’s ultimate prize: winners get a (virtual) crown and a “CR” (course record) next to their name — also known as KOM or QOM (king/queen of the mountain). Make a top ten and there are further virtual trophies.
Why else do they do it? In rare examples, cheating can lead to financial gain. Over lockdown, House caught out a Strava user who was posting super-quick treadmill marathon times as the basis to pull in backers for an attempt on a coast-to-coast running record. “The numbers just didn’t add up,” he says. “The make and model of treadmill on which he was doing these times didn’t actually go that fast. From there we figured out that there was an app that lets you input your own data and upload it.”
The runner was challenged, pulled out of the attempt and “disappeared”.
Manipulation of Strava data was also at the heart of a case involving Kate Carter, an editor at Runner’s World, this year. She missed a mid-race timing mat and posted another runner’s GPS-tracked route map for the London Landmarks Half Marathon last year (noting that it wasn’t hers), and was found to have manually created another Strava entry, for the 2023 London Marathon, based on a course map from a previous year.
Carter, 47, denied cheating but admitted making some “stupid mistakes in how I recorded my times”, saying her actions were partly ego driven. “Even in the amateur running world there is pressure to maintain form and times,” she said. An investigation by England Athletics found “there was no intention to deceive and no attempt to benefit from the results”.
Carter’s case was reported by the self-styled “marathon investigator” Derek Murphy. The 53-year-old data analyst has outed scores of cheats since setting up his blog in 2015 from his home in Ohio. He pores over race and self-tracked data looking for inconsistencies, such as missed split times in races or heart rates out of sync with pace. Strava, with its 10 billion logged activities, is a near-infinite treasure trove.
Murphy is as calmly forensic as the running community is animatedly incensed about cheating. “I simply present the facts,” he’s fond of saying.
Targeting wrongdoing in big races is one thing. But how much does common or garden cheating matter?
Green is more than happy to poke fun at the Stravasphere — in a recent Instagram post, she showed herself “dethroning” Olympians on there by targeting tiny segments of their long training runs and flat-out sprinting them, “so they get a notification saying Laura Green is faster than them!” But she reviles genuine cheating. “It’s heinous,” she says. “For me, the whole point of Strava is to see how I match up to others. So if you’re cheating, then it takes all the fun away.”
House believes the degree to which you care depends on your proximity to any shenanigans. “As I tell the runners I coach, you shouldn’t be bothered what others are up to,” he says. “But at the same time, if someone comes up my road on an ebike and steals my running crown, I’m flagging it to Strava in minutes.”
Flagging is the bedrock of the self-regulation system that Strava has no option but to rely on, given the volume of activities. Does it work? Not always, according to various threads on online forums such as LetsRun.com and Reddit, and a cursory look at the leaderboards for some of London’s most famous stretches supports these misgivings.
Take the Strava record — at the time of going to press — for the Westminster Bridge cycling segment: 350m on one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, in 5 seconds? That’s a tad over 250km/h. It was set by a “Derek Lawrie” in 2020. Let’s hope he warmed up.
It’s not the blatantly fraudulent, sometimes inadvertent cases we need to worry about, says RunnerBoi, a 26-year-old running YouTuber with almost 22,000 subscribers. It’s the stealthier attempts — and the evolution of these. “Most cheating methods are pretty catchable these days but, as with everything, the next big thing is usually something we don’t know yet,” he says.
The need for speed can be dangerous. This week, Strava has urged cyclists to delete the Regent’s Park segment from the app after the death of a pedestrian in a collision in 2022.
One of the most eye-catching forms of cheating on Strava has nothing to do with performance, at least in a conventional sense. A Reddit thread from 2021 pondering whether anyone had caught their partner being unfaithful via the platform drew this reply: “I know someone that got busted: the [activity] time was much shorter than the time he was gone and so she found him having a lot of idle time with another rider on Strava at interesting locations.”
One only hopes they remembered to turn their heart-rate monitors off.
Written by: Duncan Craig
© The Times of London
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