Waterloo runner creates Blue Jays GPS art
Ricky Martin combined his love of running and baseball to create this Canada-themed running route
With no races to enter or group runs to attend for an entire year, creating Strava art has become one of the most popular ways runners everywhere are motivating themselves on their solo runs. From Frida Khalo in San Francisco, to Santa Clause in Manchester, to the Nike Alphafly in Toronto, runners everywhere have been getting impressively creative with their running artwork, and now we’ve got yet another masterpiece to add to the virtual wall, this time with a Canadian spin: the Toronto Blue Jays logo.
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Ricky Martin (yes, that is his real name) lives in Waterloo, Ont., and is both a Jays fan and a runner. After a friend introduced him to GPS art, he was inspired to create something of his own, but the only problem was that the normal grid pattern of streets you can find in many cities was almost non-existent in Waterloo. While studying a map of his hometown, he noticed that one area vaguely made the shape of the Blue Jays logo. The area lacked the streets needed to make the more detailed parts of the beak and the maple leaf, but at this point, the idea was cemented in his mind and he knew he had to figure out how to make it happen.
Martin continued to scrutinize the map, rotating it and zooming in, until he created a route that would allow him to draw the logo. He had to get creative with it, and the route took him off the roads to run through parks, school campuses and parking lots in order to trace out the finer details of the logo. Armed with a printed list of directions and his GPS watch, Martin set off on his 10.7K route. His mission was a success, and he created a YouTube video to share his journey and process with others.
“If you choose to run in the wintertime in Canada, you have to find ways to make it fun,” he said in the video.
He has printed off several images of his successful art run, which now hang on the wall in his home. At the end of his video, he asks viewers “Am I crazy for choosing to run during the winter in Canada? Maybe. But if I wouldn’t have run during the winter in Canada, I wouldn’t have all this art, so I’ll let you be the judge.”
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