Animal Runs

Pandemic Digital Street Art

The NYC Marathon was cancelled on November 1, 2020. However, runners were encouraged to do a virtual marathon using the Strava app. Training for the marathon, I ran in animal shapes in eerily empty Brooklyn streets. I listened to audiobooks about ecology, plants and animals.

A personal heroine of mine, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, died a few weeks before the TCS virtual marathon opened on October 17, 2020. For the actual marathon, I ran for 26.5 miles in the shape of the iconic “Notorious RBG” image, while listening to two audiobooks about her life: My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsberg (with Hartner and Williams) and Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsberg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik.

Training with Animal Shapes

In the weeks before the marathon, to make running more fun, I made animal shapes using the Strava app, tracing my geolocation data at various time markers. Here are some of the images I created:

The last image with the blue outline is using the FootPath app, which was very helpful for diagramming and recording my runs, separately from Strava, since Strava does not easily allow for pre-planning routes. I drew these images using an Apple Pencil on the iPad version of FootPath, and then followed the turn-by-turn audio instructions in the mobile app while running with Strava on.

NYC Marathon

Here was my actual RBG Marathon on October 17, 2020: