In the world of running influencers, stunts can be worth just as much as impressive race results.
On TikTok, Instagram and the popular fitness app Strava, amateur and professional athletes broadcast their feats of endurance. Marathon personal bests and all-day trail running epics tend to perform well. An Olympic medal doesn’t hurt, either.
But if you don’t have any of those, there are other ways to get people to stop scrolling and pay attention to your physical activity. Some athletes have created an entire artistic genre by drawing pictures with their routes. Others have tried to run every street in a given city.
The latest trick is recording a run in an unlikely location, the more cramped the better: a 5K in a police van, a marathon in a bathtub. One man kicked off a wave of online backlash after recording a 5K inside an airplane bathroom, over the course of nearly an hour, during a flight from Cape Town to Munich.
Using the infographic that Strava automatically generates, which overlays a run’s distance, pace and route onto a photo or a video, these posts have the same slick look as a sincere race recap — except the GPS track is an absurd scribble.
No influencer has taken this concept further than Jacob Cohen, known across the internet as @notreallywellness. Mr. Cohen, 29, has posted 5K runs in increasingly unlikely locations every day since last October. Inspired by videos he’d seen of pint-size ultramarathons in backyards and living rooms during the Covid pandemic, he posted a time-lapse video of a 5K around his coffee table in an explicit bid to become a running influencer.
It worked, generating 10 times the views of his average post, he said. This was also a problem: He had promised his followers a daily video, he said, “but by Day 2, I was out of ideas.”
He has endured, posting 5K run videos from a tanning bed and a porta-potty, the top of a refrigerator and inside a dog crate. As his audience has grown — he now has over 200,000 followers on Instagram — he has run on the bed of the internet personality David Dobrik and around Diplo’s D.J. booth at a Super Bowl party.
When asked what it could possibly mean to run a 5K inside a dog crate, Mr. Cohen said he simply shuffles his feet or moves his arm around until his watch displays the right distance. Joe Heikes, a product manager for Garmin, which makes GPS running watches, said in an email that some of the runners in these videos are “completing stationary runs” without GPS, so their distance is estimated using a backup step-counting algorithm.
In other words, a watch or fitness app may interpret every jostle as forward progress that isn’t really happening.
Even when Mr. Cohen isn’t quite running, his stunts do require a level of endurance — which not all of his imitators possess. Wyatt Gillespie, a 26-year-old in Manhattan, said he was inspired by Mr. Cohen’s “absolutely insane” videos to attempt a 5K in a moving van after helping his brother haul gym equipment.
His brother drove; Mr. Gillespie tried to stay on his feet. “I was flying through the walls,” he said. “I barely even got three minutes of running.” (He posted it anyway — it turns out you can’t believe everything you see on TikTok.)
To Mr. Cohen, the absurdity of his posts is the point. He had started running to improve his health but found the earnest, instructional tone of most fitness content on social media to be grating: perfect form, clean eating, visible abs.
“Everybody’s chasing these unrealistic goals and downplaying the significance of how important it is to just get out and move,” he said. “So I was like, all right, let’s do something fun.”
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