Should I Quit My Fitness Tracking App?

Published September 17, 2025 11:33AM

I started using the fitness tracking platform Strava a few years ago and loved it. I could see my trail running times and distances improve and I pushed myself while ski touring—with my friends there to cheer me on. But lately I’ve started to sour on it: the one-upmanship, the preening, the feeling like someone is deliberately trying to beat me just to say they did—not to mention getting hit on by cheesy dudes. Now I hear about Mules and Jockeys and Surrogates: users pay someone else (faster) to carry their phone to get them a slot on the leaderboard. It seems nuts and somehow wrong. Should I just quit?

Paying someone to achieve your achievement is indeed the highest expression of human folly. It may resemble paying someone to write a college term paper. But while cheating in school is clearly unethical, cheating on a fitness tracker is does not have an obvious victim. The stakes are so low that it’s hard to fathom the motives. It’s a sort of inverse prostitution: instead of paying someone to have sex with you (to provide you pleasure), you would pay someone to have sex for you (to deprive yourself of pleasure) and then brag about it online (to convince others that you are in fact having pleasure.) If just one person did this, we’d diagnose a mental illness. But when large numbers of otherwise sane people begin to depart their senses in unison, it’s worth digging into the cultural moment.

This discussion is about the outdoors—trails, mountains, canyons, forests—and does not apply to those using Strava on the pavement or—God help them—a stationary bicycle.

And instead of focusing on the few weirdos who are making Strava a bummer for everyone else, let me examine weather—when it comes to the backcountry—Strava is itself an inherently flawed product.

I know that some users use the platform solely for themselves and don’t share their stats with other. I’m sure this is useful, but it’s not really what Strava is. You don’t need a social app to track your times and distances; you can do that with a GPS watch. Even a fledgling Luddite such as Sundog has started wearing such a contraption as he plods along the local trail, occasionally being passed by an elderly dog-walker, largely to know when it’s time to turn around before inflicting further damage on his old knees. What makes Strava a sensation is the ability to share your achievements and efforts with others who in the best case scenario will encourage you to go further and faster.

And what could be more American than the insistence that if you try harder and harder you will eventually succeed? Optimizing performance in wild places is the holy grail for the new crop of endurance athletes drawn to ultramarathons, gravel bikes and fastest known times. But let’s pause there: is the natural world actually the place to go faster and further and harder?

More than half a century ago, when the Grand Canyon was under threat of being dammed, dam boosters claimed that one benefit was the resulting reservoir that would bring untold recreational activities to the masses who would now be able to boat and fish afloat clear blue waters instead of having to descend into the gorge with its inhospitable rapids and currents and mud. The Sierra Club posted a full page ads in newspapers asking: SHOULD WE ALSO FLOOD THE SISTINE CHAPEL SO TOURISTS CAN GET NEARER THE CEILING?

What if I were to suggest that the Pope cordon off running lanes through the Vatican so I might better time my sprints, and install stairs for cardio work leading to Michaelangelo’s frescoes? One might say: this is a holy place, not one for competitive athletics and recreation. I might say the same about the mountains and canyons.

Do Strava try-hards actually damage the land? Oh, probably there’s some trampling done by the 24-hour races and days-long sieges of public lands required for an-ultra marathon. But I don’t think the environmental concerns are major. What about the fact that these overachievers are just a bit, well, irritating to others, such as yourself, FKT? That’s surely real, but I wouldn’t call it immoral.

So, no, I don’t think Strava is unethical. And yet I want to help answer your question, FKT, which is ultimately not about other people’s behavior, but your own. And in this era of magical, unprecedented, and addictive technologies, yours is a question that we all seem to face: why do I continue to do this thing that makes me unhappy?

Let me share my own story. As a mediocre athlete growing up in suburbs, Sundog was repelled by most soccer and baseball—and even surfing—because the kids who were good at these sports were already calcifying into a personality type that with the wisdom of adulthood I might call “assholes.” They were cocky, competitive, and quick to lord their superiority over the rest of us. And it worked! I was generally too intimidated and psyched-out to paddle into a wave or take a shot on goal for fear of being yelled out by some jock.

The place I finally found my teenage footing was on the crags and cliffs of Joshua Tree and Yosemite, where I turned out to be a good enough climber. It didn’t feel like the climbers of the eighties—even the talented ones—were there to prove their greatness. I discovered my people: misfits, artists, vagabonds and dreamers driven by curiosity more than competition who sought adventure and solitude and the mystical.

And yes—I actually did want to prove—to someone—my greatness, and became obsessed with pushing the numbers, wanting to climb harder routes that anyone else my age. By the time I was 18 I was already jaded and burned-out—I no longer enjoyed climbing some classic all-day 5.8 multi-pitch route in Tuolumne Meadows. I only wanted to be rehearsing some fifty-foot 5.11c. I drifted away from what I loved and ended up in a small circle of competitive jocks who, with the hindsight of adulthood, I might refer to as “assholes.”

Likely I was one of them. What began as discovery and transcendence ended as vanity and striving after wind. I quite rock climbing by the time I was 19—and even though through the next decades I taught climbing and canyoneering, it was at that point a job, and not a passion. I have some regrets. I always wanted to climb at least one grade beyond my ability, and as a result I took a series of lead falls that involved pulling gear, minor injuries, near misses, and scaring the shit out of myself and my partners. I’m lucky to have survived those years without tragedy. Now I look back and wonder: why did I have to try so hard? Why wasn’t I content to climb within my skills?

California has hundreds of gorgeous moderate routes that I never climbed because of my ambition. It’s clear now that through climbing I was trying to work out my own insecurities: I wanted to be great! I wanted other people to acknowledge that I was great! Were the cliffs of Yosemite and Joshua Tree the best places to work this shit out? Probably not.

Back to the comparison and competition that fuels Strava. There is likely a population of enlightened souls for whom this works. For the rest of us, Strava appears to be a product which—like all other social media—cultivates some of humanity’s worst traits: public boasting coupled with private insecurity as we scroll through the superior public boasts of friends and strangers.

What if the outdoors is simply not the place for competitive fitness? Leave that shit in the gym, or on the asphalt, or on the Peloton. For those who really want to time themselves, compare themselves, and in any other way optimize performance, let me politely suggest a brisk sprint around the ovular track at your local high school. The outdoors calls for far more important things than physical fitness: laying prone in the trail to study a stinkbug, making love in a meadow, watching clouds drift past peaks.

“Praise ignorance,” says Wendell Berry, “for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.” It may be true that what gets measured can then be improved. And yet there are no numbers in nature, no minutes or miles or measurements. When we humans overlay those stats on the untamed land, we likely miss the mystery it has to show us.

Mark Sundeen teaches environmental writing at the University of Montana. Got an ethical question of quandary of your own? Send it to sundogsalmanac@hotmail.com.

I Used to Love My Fitness Tracker. Now It Bums Me Out. Should I Quit?