How to make Strava art: plan it, run it, share it

Strava art is a route planned so that the line on the map makes a picture: a heart, a word, an animal, a proposal. The drawing is done with your feet or your wheels; Strava only shows it. Which means the work is in the planning, and none of it needs a subscription.

1. Plan the shape on a map

Start with the picture, then find the streets. Open a map tool that lets you draw a route along roads and see the shape as you go. Strava's own Route Builder does that, but it is a subscription feature; the free ones do it just as well for this:

• Komoot or Ride with GPS — snap to roads, drag the line, export GPX.
• Google My Maps — draw freehand or along roads, export KML, convert it.
• gpx.studio — a free browser editor that draws, splits and exports GPX with no account.

Trace the outline first, as one continuous line if you can. Most street grids have more right angles than a drawing wants, so the shape will be blocky at first; use diagonals, parks and river paths for the curves. Zoom out often. A drawing that reads at the size of a Strava map is one with few, clean strokes, not one with detail.

2. Understand what a pause draws

Strava connects every recorded point to the next one. It does not know about pauses. So when you pause at the end of one stroke, walk two blocks and resume, the map shows a straight line between the two points. That is the "pause trick", and the trick is only that the line is *straight*: you can plan for it. Put pen lifts where a straight line disappears into the drawing — along an edge you were going to draw anyway, or across the inside of a shape that is filled with other lines.

Closed shapes with no lifts are the easiest: a heart, a circle, a letter O, a simple animal outline. Letters and faces need lifts; plan each one.

3. Get it onto the watch

Export the route as GPX and load it as a course on the watch or into a phone app that shows it while you move. Garmin, Coros, Suunto and Wahoo all take a GPX course; GPX to FIT makes a course file if you want to skip Garmin Connect. Following on the phone works too, but for a long drawing a wrist is easier than a hand.

4. Record it cleanly

• Turn auto-pause off. Every crossing you wait at becomes a tiny straight line, and a drawing full of them looks scribbled.
• Keep the pen down through the strokes; walk the lifts, do not run them, so they are short.
• Open sky where you can. Tall buildings and trees pull the line off the street by tens of metres. A stroke down an avenue is straight; the same stroke under a canopy is a wobble.
• Start and finish somewhere the ends do not matter. Strava draws the whole recording, including the bit from the car park.

5. Share it, then keep it

Strava's map of the activity is the picture, and the share image from the app is fine for a phone screen. It is a few hundred pixels wide, though, and it is a picture of the map. If the drawing is one you want to keep, export the GPX — free, on the website, here is where — and it can be drawn again at any size. A Strava art print shows the shape as one clean line, no map behind it, with the distance and the date under it.

Ideas by distance and difficulty are in Strava art ideas; the tools that help are in the generators compared.