After the gyms closed and the country went on lockdown, a friend invited a group from around the country to join a virtual run club on an app called Strava. I’d never heard of it, but I got the gist—it tracks where you run, via GPS, and uploads everyone’s times into a group feed, like an Instagram for workouts. At first I declined, because I thought I couldn’t run. (Over the years I’ve had various reasons: It makes my skin too red, I can’t breathe deeply enough, my body isn’t cut out for it—it hurts.) But then, when my friend resurfaced his invitation a week later, I was a week lonelier and I asked if it was okay to join and log walks as runs. To cheat, basically.
Strava isn’t a new app—the company was founded in 2009, and it has long been popular with hardcore runners and cyclists. But I’d never run before, and I figured I wasn’t in Strava’s target demographic. I was wrong, and the experience has basically flipped my life over.
Here’s how Strava works: You create a user profile (the app is free, but there’s also a $5/month premium version), and when you go outside and start running (or walking, biking, or hiking), you open the app and hit “record.” It tracks where and how fast you go—as well as your elevation—and after the activity is over (you press “finish”), it tells you how fast you ran overall, as well as how you ran during different segments, among other data points. (You can also sync the app with an activity tracker like a Garmin running watch.) When you break your own records, you get little gold, silver, and bronze achievement medals. I love these medals.
The best part of Strava, though, is that when you link up with friends and acquaintances, you get a feed of maps showing where your friends have been, and the opportunity to leave “kudos” and comments on their runs. (A kudos is basically a thumbs up.) At first this feature seemed silly, but I now live for these kudos. Maybe it’s something about how our smiles are hidden behind masks, but I find thumbs ups are doing double duty these days.
After logging a few walks as runs, on my own Strava journey, I realized that the difference between a briskly walked mile and a slowly run mile wasn’t as big as I’d thought, and so I started punctuating my walks with stretches of running—it was galvanizing to think that friends and colleagues would be able to see my effort reflected later in the app, if they wanted. It was also galvanizing to think that each time I ran for a little longer, I’d be more likely to break my past records. In retrospect, the combination of walking and running was like my own Couch to 5K program, and now I'm mostly running.
For what it’s worth, a couple months ago I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of running at all, much less enjoying it. For most of my life, I never exercised. I thought I wasn’t cut out for it and didn’t want to embarrass myself. Eventually (in 2016, newly sober, at 33), I did join a gym and grew to love it, or to love that I didn’t hate it, but I still thought I wasn’t capable of running, and it’s been nice to prove myself wrong. (I also thought runners had to breathe exclusively through their noses, and my mind was blown when I learned that I was also wrong about that.)
It's easy to talk myself out of things—I can’t run, I hate apps—and the experience of getting into running during coronavirus lockdown has been a good reminder that the best way to learn things is to go out and keep testing these beliefs. Even if I never run again, if this all ends, I’m grateful to have gotten here, to have seen this. Running past the daffodils and the normal birds in the trees, and the exotic birds making noise in the zoo, and past the men and women, walking and running, walking their dogs, or walking with their children in strollers, many of them in masks, I feel grateful for this way for us to be solitary in the same space.
Read MoreYou Can Go For a RunOr a walk, or a bike ride. Just stay at least six feet from anyone you don't live with.
By Taylor Trudon
Trackers that do a lot more than just count steps.
By Emily Abbate, Lori Keong, and Tyler Chin