I took photographs at two different track meets on back-to-back days. At both of them, I watched something I couldn’t quite process in the moment. I witnessed athletes in two 1600M races, obsessed with Strava rather than with winning.
Both races were officially electronically timed. In each case, I photographed a runner approaching the finish line while staring down at their wrist. Not at the finish line. Not at the runner coming up beside them, about to pass them. At their watch. They were reaching across their body to stop it so their Strava page would have an accurate time.
In the first race, that runner almost lost.
In the second race, that runner did lose.
I stood there both times with the same feeling. Confusion. None of it made sense to me.
After the second race, I caught up with a coach I’d been talking to during the meet and told him what I’d witnessed. He looked like a man who’d been waiting for someone to ask. He said that keeping their statistics accurate and current had become, for some of these athletes, the entire point.
Not the race. The data about the race.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
Here is a young person who has trained for months, who has run nearly a mile at full effort. They are two or three seconds from the finish line of a competition, and in that moment, the most urgent thing on their mind is making sure their watch stops at precisely the right instant so it updates their Strava page.
The official time doesn’t matter, apparently. What counts is their time. The number that will live on their profile. The one their followers will see.
Something worth naming is happening here, and I don’t want to dismiss it as kids being kids.
That’s what good platforms do. That’s what Strava has done. They call it “community-powered motivation.” Stava makes its metrics feel more real, more permanent, more yours than the official record.
Your data. Your page. Your truth.
And if it’s not on Strava… well… did it even happen?
What I observed is not well-documented. There’s an Instagram account dedicated to calling out runners who stop their GPS watches early during marathons to post inflated personal bests. But that’s different from what I watched. Those runners weren’t gaming results after the fact. These were competitive young athletes in a live competition whose in-race attention was hijacked by an app at the worst possible moment.
The finish line is one of the most elemental things in track and field. You run toward it as fast as you can. Everything else waits.
What I watched was a failure of agency, not of character. Something had gotten inside the decision-making of those runners, not at the start of the race, not in training, but in the most pressurized, unguarded moment of competition. It rearranged their priorities without them knowing it. That’s what Humaneering is trying to name: the deliberate work of protecting human agency in a world where platforms are very good at quietly redirecting it. At stealing it.
I can’t find any research on this specific phenomenon. But some questions don’t get answered via someone else’s research. Sometimes it just requires paying attention.
I’m trying to. I hope others are as well.
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