The latest craziness is pretending to be an athlete: here's an app that runs or pedals for you

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Arthur Bouffard works in augmented reality and digital content, combining two passions: tech and art . His clients include Nike, Dior and Samsung, to name a few, but also Meta and Apple, for whom he develops immersive digital experiences. In his free time, as a good nerd, he enjoys experimenting. A few years ago, he created a website that allowed you to monitor all the routes of each bicycle of the most important bike sharing service in Paris: it was a bug that the company hastily corrected to (belatedly) protect the privacy of customers.

The latest idea is Fake My Run, a site that lets you create custom routes, which you can then upload to sports tracking apps like Strava . All this while sitting comfortably on your couch at home and without breaking a sweat. It's easy: you choose a location in the world, draw the route (being careful to connect the roads) or select the preset ones, and that's it. Fake My Run generates an authentic GPX file to which the data indicated by the user is added: pace per kilometer, heart rate, cadence and all the other feedback that amateur runners care about. Each invented route costs sixty cents and, in just a few weeks, the site has already had around 150,000 visits. Even the New York Times reported it and curiosity pushed us to contact Bouffard to hear the story from his own words . “The idea came to me when I heard about “running mules,” that phenomenon in which some people hire other athletes to run for them. I wanted to show how, lately, many sports and leisure activities – and running in particular – have become increasingly performative and designed for social media. So a hobby, from a pure moment of leisure, has transformed into a tool to affirm a status and the ego.”

With this idea, Bouffard also reveals how important the judgment of others is in our lives. "In running this is evident, but the phenomenon is also on the rise in swimming and cycling. Some, on my site, go for pure fun and curiosity, creating impossible routes in pleasant locations; others want to get a real fake run". The idea did not go unnoticed by the top management of Strava, who in a statement declared that they "have taken measures to eliminate the activities and ban the accounts that had used Fake My Run". According to Bouffard "they are using artificial intelligence and relaunching the development of the application". What remains in the end is the sad portrait of adults scared by the idea of ​​being irrelevant, driven by the need to feel alive, while time passes and with it the minutes of running. Fake My Run is a sort of Instagram filter that helps to build this identity on a daily basis (read Zygmunt Bauman): it offers an optimized version of itself, capable of increasing likes and amazed comments, but it will continue to leave that desolate sense of emptiness. Kelvin Kiptum, from above, pray for us.

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