aAnyone who saw the run that Tom Vickery uploaded to the sports-tracking app Strava on February 18th of last year might have been a little confused. The 30-minute sprint appeared to be taking place in the middle of the Channel, not far from Guernsey, toward the west coast of France. And, oddly enough, the run was in a straight line, as measured by a ruler, and was shown on Vickery’s public profile as a one-inch, unbending orange line within a blue swath of the app’s virtual ocean. Oh, and it was on world-record-breaking pace.
Of course, it probably came as no surprise to anyone who knows Vickery. The 38-year-old triathlon coach from Cambridge was on holiday to Bilbao for a two-day ferry trip, and this fairly fast jog was just one of almost four years of daily runs he had been recording on Strava at the time. Determined not to break the record on board, Vickery got up at 5am and spent his allotted 30 minutes sprinting up and down the deck. As the boat slid through the water, he appeared to be running faster than any long-distance runner in the world.
This is just one example of the lengths some people will go to to maintain a “streak.” A streak is something (actually anything) that continues uninterrupted over a period of time. It’s a form of gamification: the process of adding game-like elements to a task to make it more engaging. Perhaps the most famous “streak holder” is British runner Ron Hill, who ran every day for 52 years and 39 days (or 19,032 consecutive days), even going for a jog the day after breaking his sternum in a car accident in 1993.
Hill, a scientist, used to keep a diary of his runs, but more recently, advances in technology have made it possible to keep track of streaks in a more streamlined and user-friendly way. For example, on Snapchat, the word “streak” is part of the lexicon. A “snap streak” is the number of consecutive days that a user sends “snaps,” either photos or messages, to other users. To maintain a snap streak, a user must send a snap within a 24-hour period or the streak ends.
Source: www.theguardian.com
