Strava art is a picture drawn with your feet or your wheels: a route planned so that the line on the map makes a shape. The shape is the point, and a print of it should show the shape and nothing else — which is what the clean-line motif does. Your GPS drawing as a single line on paper, the distance and the date under it, and no street map arguing with the picture.
Why the map comes off
On Strava the drawing sits on a map, because that is where it was made. On paper the map is noise: every road that is not part of the picture is a line through it. The clean-line print removes the background and keeps the line, so a heart is a heart and a word is legible. If you want the context of where it was run, the map print exists — but for art, most people choose the line alone.
The line is drawn as a vector from your coordinates, so it is sharp at 70×100 cm. The GPS wobble that comes with every recording stays in it; that is part of a drawing made by running, and it reads as hand-drawn rather than as an error.
Before you run it: the trim
One thing to know before you plan a piece: the first and last 500 metres of every activity are clipped before printing, and the trim does not go to zero. It protects your home address on every other print, and it applies here too. For a drawing, start and finish 500 metres away from where the picture begins — a lap around the block before the first stroke, and after the last — and the whole shape survives. How the trim works.
Getting the drawing out of Strava
Connect the account in the editor and pick the activity, or export the GPX from strava.com — more menu, Export GPX, free on any plan, website only (the guide). A drawing made over several activities can be brought in as several files; the editor draws them together.
If you have not made one yet: plan the shape on a map first, keep the strokes on roads you can actually run, and remember the trim at both ends. The drawing is the hard part; the print is the easy one.
Sizes, paper, frame
Route print: 30×40, 50×70 or 70×100 cm on Museum 250 gsm or Classic 170 gsm, from 319 kr. Framed behind acrylic in a solid wood frame, from 799 kr. Choose the line colour — including the house orange — and which numbers go under the drawing. Most Strava art prints carry the distance and the date and leave out the pace, because nobody drew a dragon for a personal best.
All the ways to print a Strava route are on Strava prints. Epic Efforts is not affiliated with Strava.
How to plan a drawing, forty ideas by distance, the free planners compared and the largest GPS drawings ever are in the Strava art guides.