An avid runner and Strava app user in Toronto released his 10-month-long project this week, transforming a city map into a giant cartoon animation. 

Like many other runners, cyclists, hikers, and walkers around the world, accountant Duncan McCabe creates art through the Strava app, which tracks physical exercise through GPS and allows users to create all sorts of images through their movements, including animals, plants, shapes, letters, and words. 

McCabe told blogTO that he was inspired to create Strava art last year after he came across a project by Mike Scott, who biked over 46 kilometres across Toronto to create a beaver-shaped route using the app. 

Last year, McCabe received over 180,000 views on his first Strava project, in which he created lots of dancing animals and even spelled out Toronto through runs recorded on the app. 

@duncan77mccabe I turned my summer runs into Strava app animations. 🦖🦒🦝🐳🦈 #Toronto #running #strava #run #stravarun #stravaart #summer #dinosaur #raccoon #giraffe #whale #narwhal #shark #foryou #tiktokchallenge #tiktok #funny #fun #tiktokcomedy #comedyvideo #adventure #lol #fitness #workout #healthy #motivation #lifestyle #animals #animalsoftiktok #video ♬ Animals (Remix) - 祁念

Now, he has released his second project — an animation of a dancing stick man who shimmies across the city to SOFI TUKKER's hit song, "Purple Hat." The inspiration for the animation itself came from McCabe's song choice. "I designed the hat early in January, but the hat doesn't actually come into the animation until July. I knew I was going to use that song the whole time."

"That's what inspired it; him wearing a hat and him taking off the hat," he said. 

The compilation is the result of 121 runs McCabe completed between January and October 2024. 

@duncan77mccabe Strava art animation through the streets of Toronto! This took me 121 runs from January to October 2024. #strava #running #toronto #purplehat #active #run #Canada #motivation #madden25 #ncaa #purple #hat #sofitukker #sofi #tukker ♬ original sound - Duncan McCabe

"I like the idea of Strava art, and I'm going to do my run anyways, so might as well satisfy the creative itch while I'm at it," he told blogTO. "Since a Strava map is essentially a single frame, I loved the idea of turning them into an animation and adding a bunch of frames to make movement. Each run was about 10 kilometres."

The project required quite a bit of planning, although McCabe says its execution was made easier by Toronto's layout. 

"Luckily, Toronto's a grid, so that makes things easy for a stick man. Since the movements are incremental, you just have to plan out the next little move. Things move pretty slowly, so one weekend, I'll map out the next few weeks of specific runs, and then execute," he explained. 

"I had it mapped out in January at a high level, but the specific dance moves, many of them, didn't get figured out until part way through." 

McCabe says that to make the animation look fluid, he had to complete at least 120 runs or frames. "The same run, if I used 60 images, it would look very choppy, if you have a lot of frames it looks fluid, so that was the motivation to keep doing it even in bad weather," he said, explaining that many of the runs had to take place in the winter.

McCabe's video managed to garner an impressive number of views on TikTok, but the attention really began to soar on Thursday afternoon, when CBC Sports reporter and broadcaster, Ben Steiner, shared the video on his X account. Since then, the video has amassed over 11 million views and over 190,000 likes. 

"When I went to bed, I hadn't seen anything on Twitter," McCabe said. "Absorbing that right now, it's really great. The comments on TikTok are so supportive, the comments on Twitter are really skeptical." 

One main point of skepticism, McCabe says, has been the animation's diagonal lines, which some people suspected couldn't be done without running through people's backyards. 

"In Strava, if you run, stop the run, and then go, say, around a square block, and then press start again, it immediately connects the two dots of where it was last active. That's a clever way to make the diagonal line across, let's say, a school," he clarified. 

"That means when I'm doing these runs, I'm running, I'm stopping, and I'm starting. For example, it's running around the corner and starting again. Since my man turns sideways at one point and has lots of diagonal lines, it might say I did eight kilometres, but I actually did 10 kilometres because of the diagonal lines." 

Although McCabe doesn't have any future designs currently in the works, he says he is open to creating another project.