6 hours ago
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In 2013, I was in the worst shape of my life. Though I functioned well day to day, I was a heavy binge drinker and smoker. Unfit, obese and unhappy, on impulse I signed up to a white-collar boxing fight. I trained six days a week for three months, shifting three stone by fight night. Winning that fight was great, though turning my life around had been my main goal. After that, I started challenging myself regularly while raising money for mental health charities.
My first 24-hour challenge involved ascending Pen y Fan – the highest peak in south Wales – 10 times in a row during the dead of winter. It was horrific, but it raised lots of money, so next time I wanted something even bigger. Having seen examples of Strava art online, I thought that might be a good way to get people’s attention. I decided on a big run in the Bannau Brycheiniog (formerly the Brecon Beacons), an hour from my home, and chose November to coincide with Men’s Health Awareness Month. A giant penis seemed the obvious way to represent this, plus it was undeniably eye‑catching. I researched previous examples made using GPS mapping, all created on foot in a single, continuous effort. Plenty of them were three or four miles long, but I was aiming for something on a much grander scale.
Using the Strava planner, I found a route resembling a shaft between England and Wales, right up Offa’s Dyke. I thought, “Brilliant. Can I tack on a little bell-end at the top, near Hay-on-Wye?” Yes, there it was. “Now, can I squeeze some balls on at the bottom?” The whole thing took shape very easily, taking in Crickhowell and Llangenny, and passing serendipitously through a village called Three Cocks. Only then did I realise the route was just over 72 miles (116km) long, with almost 10,000ft of elevation. But now I’d plotted the picture, I had to do it.
I started and ended in Abergavenny, where I set off at 5pm on 1 November 2024, running for 12 hours in darkness. Friends were stationed en route to run alongside me for a while and keep my spirits up; likewise my brother was waiting for me right on the tip. Without their encouragement, I don’t know if I’d have made it. The first 20 miles were uphill, and after 50 I just wanted to die, yet still had the best part of a whole marathon to go.
Bone-tired and wrapped in a Welsh flag, I crossed the finish line at 4.30pm the following afternoon, half an hour shy of the 24-hour mark. A local craftsman presented me with a 3D-printed cock and balls trophy. The giant manhood has also been recreated in cake form by my mother, to celebrate my 40th birthday, and I’ve even been a question on Have I Got News for You. Some have suggested my real aim was to make my name the top result whenever anyone Googles “world’s biggest penis”. Alas, it turns out the search terms have to be a bit more specific.
‘I turned too soon coming out of the shark’s mouth’
Samppa Tölli put on ice skates to etch a 16km image of a great white shark on to a frozen lake in Finland
Hiidenvesi is the second-largest lake in Finland’s Uusimaa region, north-west of Helsinki. My parents have lived near the lake since I was a kid, so I’ve known it all my life. In summer, I’d ride around the surrounding bike trails or go out in my kayak. I still live nearby. During the winter the lake freezes over, and in 2023 I spent a lot of time skating on it.
After a couple of months, doing the same circuits started to feel a little repetitive. The idea of creating a GPS picture on ice was an attempt to shake things up a bit. I decided to try an animal that lives in water and, though not a creature you’d naturally find in the lake, a shark seemed to fit. I adapted a simple colouring picture I’d found online that used one continuous line, then I placed it on to the map, making sure the fin and tail fitted neatly into coves around the shoreline.
When I’m on my bike, I strap my GPS watch to the handlebars so I can always keep an eye on it. It’s trickier to see where I am on the map while skating, because I have to move my arm in front of my face. So when I skated the shark, I was moving more slowly than I usually would, a situation made worse by the fact the ice wasn’t particularly smooth that day. There was also fog that affected visibility – when I started, I couldn’t see more than a couple of hundred metres ahead. This meant I wasn’t able to rely on any landmarks to keep me oriented.
Although making GPS art in a big open space offers a lot of freedom, it was difficult to work out exactly when to turn, and how much by. For example, I turned too soon when coming out of the shark’s mouth and had to skate back and fix it. I also had to make some compromises, such as the gills, which I chose to skate in a zigzag, rather than pausing and unpausing the recording so I could make a series of parallel lines.
Overall, I was happy with how the 16km-long (10 mile) shark turned out. After Strava posted it on their Instagram page, I got a few new followers and some complimentary messages, which encouraged me to try more GPS art. The following February, I spent two hours skating a more detailed picture of an eagle, as a celebration of the sea eagles you see around that part of the lake during wintertime. As a child I dreamed of seeing one but never did – nowadays they’re rare in Finland.
My most recent piece, completed at the start of this year, was a response to someone who suggested I try a single-line drawing of a woman. The line was more than 7km long. I was unable to skate that one, though – there was too much snow on the ice on the day I’d chosen, so instead I did it on my cyclocross bike using spiked tyres. I don’t yet have a specific picture planned for next winter, but I’m open to suggestions.
‘Chappell Roan performs with a punk spirit that appeals to me. I’ve also done Whitney and Pet Shop Boys’
Frank Chan ran almost 75km to draw a portrait of singer Chappell Roan in San Francisco
Running is something I didn’t really embrace until I was approaching middle age – I ran the San Francisco Marathon in 2018 and just got hooked. There’s something about the meditative aspect of longer runs that appeals to me. They require a lot of training, of course, and you need to do most of your running at an easy pace. What better way to slow yourself down than to look at a map?
That’s how I got into doing Strava art, which has the added advantage of encouraging me to mix up my routes. I’ve done all sorts, from pop culture characters like Ariel from The Little Mermaid to more personal ones like a picture of my mom tying my laces that I did for Mother’s Day. I’ve collaborated with another Strava artist called Lenny Maughan on images like Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, where he ran God’s hand on the east side of the city and I ran Adam’s hand in the west, and I’ve created more meaningful pieces, such as spelling out the name of Ahmaud Arbery, who was murdered in a racially motivated hate crime while running in 2020.
Music is a big thing for me, so that’s the subject I return to most often. Until recently, I’ve tended to stick to music I grew up with, such as punk and Britpop. The aim with my album-cover drawings is to ensure that people who know that particular sleeve art will recognise it instantly. When I did Actually by the Pet Shop Boys, people generally got that, though there were some who said, “Is that two ice‑cream cones?” Whitney Houston’s Instagram page re-posted my Strava art version of the photo from her second album – an absolute honour.
I don’t think I’m necessarily the target audience for Chappell Roan, but she’d become such a phenomenon that she came to my attention. She performs with a certain punk spirit that appeals to me – she’s unapologetic and clearly has a sense of humour. I decided to recreate the sleeve of her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, on the first anniversary of its release.
The layout of San Francisco is pretty much a grid pattern. I can see how some older, pre-automobile cities might offer opportunities for more interesting routes, where you’re not so constrained by blocks, but there are moments where I can optimise things on the ground – for example, cutting across a parking lot might improve a diagonal. What I most want to avoid is missing a turn and offsetting part of the picture by a block – with Chappell, for example, I didn’t want to end up with one eye bigger than the other.
Like Whitney, Chappell was a three-day effort, covering almost 75km (50 miles). I tend to stop as it’s getting dark, or when I’m fading, then resume from the same spot the next day. Having decided on the scale of the runs, I work out how much detail I want to include, and which flourishes I’m happy to omit in order to avoid another couple of days’ running.
There’s a certain degree of uncertainty with Strava mapping when running near tall buildings, as they can cause the satellite signal to glitch, and I took a wrong turn on the Pet Shop Boys piece, which means Neil Tennant looks as though he’s sticking his tongue out rather than yawning. I’m pleased with Chappell, though – I think she turned out great.
Frédéric de Lanouvelle and his daughter Mathilde used a tandem to cycle a 2,162km heart in France
I have always been close to my four daughters and decided some years ago that it would be fulfilling to share a special adventure with each of them when they reached the age of 16. For example, my eldest daughter, Cécile, and I travelled to southern Morocco to run the 250km, seven-day Marathon des Sables in the Sahara desert. It was wonderful to experience this with her, but my second daughter, Mathilde, made it clear that she didn’t want to do the same thing for her 16th birthday.
We struggled to come up with an original idea that felt equally special, until a colleague showed me a newspaper article about a group of French cyclists who had created the world’s biggest GPS drawing made by bicycle: a 1,025km dinosaur. Mathilde likes cycling, so I suggested we attempt something similar on a tandem.
Five or six years earlier, we’d ridden a tandem for 600km round Île-de-France starting near our home in Paris. We had good memories of this adventure and decided that for our new one we should try to raise money for a charity. We chose Mécénat Chirurgie Cardiaque, an organisation that provides heart surgeries for children in countries with limited access to such care. That’s why our route was planned in the shape of an enormous cartoon heart – starting and finishing in Lyon, the journey would measure 2,162km in total, almost 1,350 miles.
We did only three days’ tandem training before the August 2023 trip, cycling more than 100km each time, but aimed to cover about 150km a day while making our attempt. On days where the landscape was mostly flat, we started at 7am and checked in at our destination – usually a pre-booked hostel or Airbnb – at 4-5pm. But on days with more uphill stretches, we sometimes didn’t finish until 8-9pm. Still, one of the benefits of riding a tandem was that if either of us ever felt particularly weak, the other could usually pedal a little harder to make up for it.
We faced more serious issues than tiredness, though. Five days in, I had to mend one of the spokes on the back wheel and made a somewhat clumsy job of it. Less than an hour into our ride the following day, the spoke came loose again and got caught in the bike’s chain, breaking both that and the derailleur gears. Even the frame of the bike cracked. Less than a week into our adventure, it seemed we might have to abandon it entirely. Instead, local people rallied to help. A mechanic was found and everything was fixed in a few hours. There were no further major setbacks, but day 13 proved a particular challenge. We were in France’s Massif Central highland region and, although our surroundings were beautiful, the cycling was very tough.
In the end, we completed the heart on the 16th day. Guinness World Records recognised our achievement, though it was unofficially beaten a few months later by another French cycling duo who recreated the Olympic rings. Still, the adventure was never about the world record; that was just the cherry on the cake. The main reason was to share extraordinary moments and build memories with my daughter. We also raised enough for two children to have the operations they needed. We’ve met one of them, which gave us a great sense of satisfaction. Now my third daughter and I have just over a year to decide what we’re going to do for her 16th birthday. All we know so far is that it will probably involve horses.
‘It captures my dog’s character, even if it does look like something scribbled by a toddler’
Chiara Franzosi ran 60km around Edinburgh to draw her cocker spaniel, Miles
When I moved to Scotland from Italy about 10 years ago I was already hooked on running, but it was in Edinburgh that I really fell in love with the whole scene. I’d explore the city as part of my daily run and met many friends that way – and my partner, too. Gradually, I got into long-distance races and running on mountain trails. When Covid-19 hit and races started getting cancelled, I had to rethink my routine and find new ways to motivate myself, such as running up and down the Royal Mile 26 times.
Not long after I’d completed my Royal Mile marathon, we bought a cocker spaniel puppy – I called him Miles. When I committed myself to running seven marathons over seven consecutive days in May 2021, Miles became the motivation for another of my training challenges. I’d been using GPS to create routes for my long runs, and had also seen some particularly impressive Strava art online. I thought, “Maybe I could do something like that, drawing one of the things I love the most?”
I found a route above the Water of Leith that looked like it could be a spaniel’s ear, and working from there I started to see if I could achieve the whole dog. It became quite difficult to draw the back legs and tail, because the part of the city where they fell is quite industrial and made up of straight lines and sharp corners, which wasn’t ideal for the “freehand” effect I was after. But, after a bit of trial and error, I managed to draw something that resembled a 60km (37 miles) version of Miles leaping over the Pentland Hills.
I’ve since bought a fancy GPS sports watch that allows you to check on your progress as you make your way round the route, but at the time of the run, in February 2021, I had a cheaper version without that feature. For the training runs, I’d refer to my Strava drawing and run different sections of it on different days. I remember getting a bit confused on the tail and having to back up – it was quite hard to remember everything by heart, but it did help take my mind off the distance.
The day of the run was beautiful, but it had snowed quite heavily a night or two before, and some of the footpaths had been covered in drifts from passing snowploughs. I ended up doing a lot of hopping from side to side between roads and paths, and there was a quite treacherous stretch beside the Grand Union canal, where the snow had become icy. But starting at 7.30am I completed the run in just over six hours – not a bad pace given the conditions.
I think “Cocker Spaniel Leaping Over the Pentlands” captures something of Miles’s character, even if it does look more like something scribbled by a toddler than some of the artistic Strava pieces I’ve seen other runners achieve around Edinburgh. I haven’t attempted any more Strava art since, but Miles is now my loyal running companion.
