Fitness
To mark the final leg of 2018's Red Bull Million Mile Commute, an endurance runner and map maker have joined forces to create a stunning Strava artwork.
Forget Da Vinci. Keep your Rembrandt. Same goes for the bloke from Art Attack, too. Because frankly no artist - not even with crisp 4G and GPS tracking - could hold a torch to this Strava-enabled masterpiece, below.
That’s right, it’s our famous logo, etched into a map around Teddington, West London by endurance runner Susie Chan and cartographer Owen Delaney. Produced to coincide with the final push for 2018’s Red Bull Million Mile Commute, the effort that went into this shot was something else.
"It was much more challenging than I expected," says Owen. "In contrast to the Christmas Strava Art I did a couple of years ago, where I let the paths and tracks of the park lead me in creating the designs, you can't improvise so much with a logo or it quickly loses its identity."
“The planning took much longer than anything I'd done before; around 7-8 hours working on different design options before agreeing on something that could work. You can get away with tracking back on yourself with straight lines, and, to an extent, curves, like we did with the edges of the sun, but if we had to re-run any parts of the bulls, it would have meant having to start over."
Luckily, the plan was a resounding success. Clocking up 2.91miles in a duration of 34 minutes and 24 seconds, the pair plotted their course through the wilds of Teddington's Bushy Park, an area which more than lived up to its name: “It was hard going for us at times,” says Owen. “With all the thick foliage and plenty of ant hills hidden in the long grass to negotiate through, it proved a good lower leg workout."
With 2018's Red Bull Million Mile Commute still open for sign-ups, there's plenty of time to whip up a piece of artwork yourself. In the meantime, if anyone has a contact for The Louvre, that would be excellent.
