Dear Strava,
Thank you for Local Legend - and more specifically thank you for "Child of an unmarried mother" Hill.
Whaaaat, Strava? There's a hill that I run up called "Child of an unmarried mother"?!
I'm not particularly bothered about being the Local Legend...although of course it does give me a minor ego boost.
And I'm sure if it were a more popular running route, and there were multiple other runners over whom I had achieved Local Legend status, then the motivational and status-enhancing effect would be multiplied, despite my delusions that that sort of stuff doesn't matter to me (it does, I'm human).
And I do like all the performance stats that you give me Strava.
Splits, Heart-rate and the rest.
To a certain extent at least.
"The-quantified-man" - or something similar - is a phrase I read about somewhere recently (with a rightly critical implication) that rang particularly true with me.
Yes and, I am totally and utterly intrigued by the fact that there's a hill called "Child of an unmarried mother".
It invokes history, pathos, wonder.
It sets my mind wandering into an unknowable past.
It reminds me of Ernest Hemingway's masterpiece.
It helps give me a sense of perspective and of my own insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe…which, after all, and despite the pomposity of dwelling on cosmic insignificance, is psychologically healthy on account of the ego dissolution that results.
Thanks Strava, for helping me run up that hill, not thinking about my Average Elapsed Pace, but rather about the child and the mother, and what their story might have been. Before I know it, I'm at the top.
And thank you Strava for the lesson in Unintended Consequences.
I'd love to think that your intention was to help runners escape their statosphere and escape into a different motivational world by sending them Local Legend emails.
And I'd love to think that you ran the thought experiment and hypothesised how Local Legend emails might provide runners with a deeper connection to place and history.
As you have in my case, by creating an additional layer of meaning to my running and thereby creating a deeper and stickier relationship with you.
Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. But you have reminded me of the huge value of playing out all of the possible scenarios and consequences of an experience's features, both to avoid the negative one's, but more importantly to make more of the positive one's.
Thanks again
Ned