When B.C.’s Janine Strong got into road cycling in 2019, she had no idea it would lead her down the path of Strava art: the creation of massive GPS-tracked sketches around the world.
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Janine Strong was never going to stop.
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Not when she got caught in a frigid January downpour in Victoria so heavy it made her cellphone glitch.
Not when she was shimmying her socked feet across a pipe spanning a river in Massachusetts, bicycle cleats in hand, her carbon fibre Trek Domane slung across her shoulder.
Not when she ran straight into a street party in New York, with 300 people and a bouncy castle blocking the boulevard.
Not even when she crashed hard in the rain, fracturing her pelvis and elbow.
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The Vancouver Island native is too dedicated to her craft: Strava art.
“I often think I’m just out here by myself doing this crazy shit. And nobody really cares, and nobody really gets it. But, you know what? I just feel driven to do it,” she said. “That’s also part of the fun. You never know what’s going to happen out there.”
Strava art is a niche and thoroughly modern invention. The Strava fitness app tracks outdoor exercise activities through GPS satellites, then allows you to share your route and results to followers. And some saw another possibility — the ability to draw their own massive sketches from a satellite’s eye view.
Being a world traveller, Strong has spent her life on the move. It’s only natural her art does, too.
Wherever she’s been, she’s etched a bike sketch. She’s cycled out giant bananas and long-haired women in New York, Santas in Victoria, penguins in Campbell River, strawberries in San Francisco, and earlier this week, a 200-kilometre long crocodile that stretches from UBC to east of Fort Langley. It was a massive undertaking, but still short of her longest — a 482-km virtual drawing along the coast of Cape Cod.
A post shared by Janine Strong (@strava.artist)
She has an extensive portfolio of photography and artwork, and only began seriously cycling in 2019. It wasn’t long before she found a way to merge her loves.
“We all learn to ride bikes as kids. I think it’s a funny thing how when we get our driver’s licence, we kind of sit down the bike oftentimes. And so that’s definitely what happened for me … 2019 was really my first year really becoming a serious road cyclist, and I got bitten by the bug really hard,” she said.
“I’ve always loved maps, and then when I had this new-found love for cycling, to be able to combine my love for drawing and art with it? It was like this perfect intersection of those things.”
Her first efforts were, by her assessment, rudimentary and simplistic, but quickly progressed to more intricate designs. While some in the Strava art community — it’s a very widespread and popular one — use photo shop overlaid on maps to plan their routes, Strong goes for a more analog method.
“There is something about finding an image in a map of city streets that has been there forever, like being the one to make something emerge out of the map that’s essentially always been there, but nobody had actually just drawn it,” said the UBC grad.
“I don’t even want to know how many hours I have spent on some of these pieces, figuring them out, because that’s the thing that takes the time. Executing it is minimal compared to the planning and figuring out the route. But there’s something that I love about that too, about zooming in, zooming out, and looking at the angles of streets.”
“Sometimes it just feels magical, the way it comes together. And I’m like, ‘click, click, click, oh yeah, this works.’ I’m sort of clicking it out on my map, online, and other times, it’s super frustrating, and it takes me many, many, many, many tries and many, many, many, many hours.”
Those clicks have taken her down back alleys in Brooklyn, the rolling highland hills of the Berkshires, the desert climes of Joshua Tree, Calif., and all over the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island. The crocodile took her over the Port Mann and Alex Fraser bridges, and into the depths of the north end of Delta’s Burns Bog.
“I think my love of travel is just seeing somewhere new and going somewhere new,” she said. “That’s something that’s always very cool about these pieces; I would never ride in some of the places that these drawings take me unless I was doing one. Even when it’s a city that felt like home for decades, there is always a street you have never been down.”
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