I quit Strava (DEN)

I quit Strava. I feel like that may be going against one of the cardinal rules of runners in the information age. There is the old adage of, “If it’s not on the internet, did it really happen?” When I hear something like that, all I can hear is, “If other people don’t know about it, does it really matter?”

To be fair here, I only used Strava for less than 2 months. I had no interest in it before then, but Ryan Starbuck created a group just for NP5280, and the FOMO hit me! With finally ramping up my running miles after surgery, I thought that it might be a good way to get some accountability. Some extra eyes on me might make me do more, or do better… whatever the fuck that means. The experience, in 2 words (#SayTwoWords), fucking sucked!

Let me preface this by saying that for someone who needs external motivation to get out and train, Strava is a great tool! The social component DOES add some extra accountability. Me… I’m not that guy. I run when I want to run, and I don’t when I don’t want to. It’s as easy as that. No stress. No pressure. It just so happens that most of the time I DO want to run!

So what happened when I was using Strava? I freaked the fuck out! Let me explain. I didn’t care about if people thought I was slow, or if they thought I wasn’t running enough miles. I’ve got my training philosophies, and I’m not changing those just because people are watching. What did I freak out about? If people reacted to my runs. I watched if people gave kudos or comments on my runs. I would check multiple times a day just to check if people acknowledged that I ran! I wasted my time worrying about something that I literally don’t give any fucks about: whether or not you know that I ran! I was seeking external validation on something that has always been internally validating for me. I was searching for a dopamine hit about the thing that makes me feel best, thus marginalizing the high I get from running itself! I was focusing on how others saw me instead of how I saw myself.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like talking to people about running. I like telling people about my runs, and hearing about other people’s runs. I just don’t give a fuck about how far or how fast you went. Those are small-talk details. I’d rather talk about why we run and how we feel when we run. I’d rather talk about what we learn about ourselves when we run. I’d rather talk about running as a meditation and self exploration, than about running as a physics equation.

Like I said, I think that Strava is a cool tool for the right audience. I’m just not that audience. So what now? I go back to using my Google Spreadsheet to track fucking everything. That thing focuses me on the experience of running, and tracking progress in ways that are meaningful to me. It focuses me on me instead of what others think of me. In the end, I run because I love it, and I want to get better at running. That’s it.

There’s a message in there. It may not even apply to running for you, but we all have something that we do simply for the joy of it. We invest more of ourselves into it to see just how deep we can go. But when we lose focus on why we do it, and simply add more around it because we can, it’s easy to get lost. It’s easy to focus on all of the peripherals and lose sight of that joy. If it doesn’t add to the experience, don’t add it. Don’t over complicate it.

Leave everyone better than you found them,
Matthew

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