When Your Workouts Turn Into a Work of Art

Using the maps from his daily runs, Duncan McCabe took the Strava art trend to new heights by creating an animated stickman that has become an online sensation.

Over the summer, when Duncan McCabe would tell his co-workers at his Toronto-area software company that he was heading out for a run, they would ask him whether he was training for a race.

“No,” he would tell them, “I have to go work on my stickman.”

Mr. McCabe, 32, readily acknowledged to his friends and colleagues that his side project was difficult to explain. So he urged them to be patient. He hoped that it would all make sense — eventually.

Sure enough, Mr. McCabe’s vision sprang to life a little over a week ago in the form of a 27-second video on TikTok, where his stickman has been dancing his way to internet celebrity.

Reminiscent of an old-school flipbook, the stickman is an animated compilation of about 120 of Mr. McCabe’s runs from Strava, the exercise-tracking platform. Mr. McCabe, who works for his company’s accounting team, used the app’s map function to record his runs in the form of a hat-wearing, long-legged figure superimposed over Toronto’s city grid.

Gyrating to the funky beat of Sofi Tukker’s “Purple Hat,” the stickman shrugs his shoulders, waves his arms and doffs his cap at about five frames, or five 10-kilometer runs, per second. For Mr. McCabe, it was a 10-month labor of love. By his final run for the project, in October, the all-too-familiar streets of his neighborhood had become a prison of his own creation, the stickman equal parts muse and tyrant.