Over the summer, when Duncan McCabe would tell his co-workers at his Toronto-area software company that he was heading out for a run, they would ask him whether he was training for a race.
“No,” he would tell them, “I have to go work on my stickman.”
Mr. McCabe, 32, readily acknowledged to his friends and colleagues that his side project was difficult to explain. So he urged them to be patient. He hoped that it would all make sense — eventually.
Sure enough, Mr. McCabe’s vision sprang to life a little over a week ago in the form of a 27-second video on TikTok, where his stickman has been dancing his way to internet celebrity.
Reminiscent of an old-school flipbook, the stickman is an animated compilation of about 120 of Mr. McCabe’s runs from Strava, the exercise-tracking platform. Mr. McCabe, who works for his company’s accounting team, used the app’s map function to record his runs in the form of a hat-wearing, long-legged figure superimposed over Toronto’s city grid.
Gyrating to the funky beat of Sofi Tukker’s “Purple Hat,” the stickman shrugs his shoulders, waves his arms and doffs his cap at about five frames, or five 10-kilometer runs, per second. For Mr. McCabe, it was a 10-month labor of love. By his final run for the project, in October, the all-too-familiar streets of his neighborhood had become a prison of his own creation, the stickman equal parts muse and tyrant.
“I became one with the stickman,” Mr. McCabe said, deadpan. “We shared thoughts, dreams and aspirations. I needed to consider his needs as much as my own.”
Strava art has become a semi-popular pastime among some of the more creative users of app. People have used the platform to produce images of animals and insects, words and phrases, even street-bound facsimiles of the Mona Lisa (from the Louvre) and Walter White (from “Breaking Bad”).
But Strava art tends to be one-and-done: a single image etched during one walk, run or bicycle ride. Mr. McCabe wanted to do something different. He wanted to create art that moved.
“It’s an unbelievable amount of work,” he said, “for a few seconds of content.”
The stickman was not Mr. McCabe’s first foray into the genre. Last year, he turned roughly 700 kilometers, or about 430 miles, of running into a 31-second video of various creatures — a dinosaur, giraffe, raccoon, whale, narwhal and shark — stomping around his Toronto neighborhood. The art has the earnest feel of something drawn by a shaky-handed fifth-grader.
“Some of those animals,” Mr. McCabe said, “are actually pretty bad.”
But it was a learning experience. Moving forward, Mr. McCabe understood that he needed to be better about planning the design. (No more winging it.) He also came to the realization that animations look more fluid when they include more frames per second. That, of course, requires more work, but Mr. McCabe seems willing to suffer for his art.
“He’s really committed to everything he wants to do,” his wife, Andrea Morales, said.
Last December, Mr. McCabe was devising a new project when his wife suggested a flipbook stickman. Perhaps there would be elegance in its simplicity.
“She helped me reach the ‘A-ha!’ moment,” Mr. McCabe said.
Mr. McCabe began his stickman runs amid the winter chill of January, and the slow monotony of his project began to seep in over the coming weeks. The same streets. The same storefronts.
“The same cats,” Mr. McCabe said. “I was recognizing cats.”
He managed to break free exactly once, when he went on a long, scenic run with his father in North Frontenac, Ontario, about 80 miles outside Ottawa, in late June. “Running in nature? What a treat,” he said.
Soon enough, it was back to the stickman grind. Mr. McCabe’s final run was on Oct. 25, and he quickly got to work stitching together dozens upon dozens of screenshots using Final Cut, a video editing tool.
Proving the internet is a mercurial and unpredictable beast, Mr. McCabe’s TikTok was not an instant hit. In its first three days of existence, it received about 40 likes, he said.
“I thought that maybe it just wasn’t meant to be,” he said.
But Ben Steiner, a Toronto-based sports journalist with more than 17,000 followers on X, soon reposted Mr. McCabe’s video, and Mr. McCabe awoke on Friday morning to find that his Strava account had been bombarded with new followers overnight.
“I’ve seen a lot of the Toronto running community,” Mr. Steiner wrote on X, “but this guy wins.”
That turned out to be one of the sparks that Mr. McCabe’s work needed to combust into an online sensation. As of Monday, Mr. Steiner’s post had been viewed more than 25 million times, while Mr. McCabe estimated that his video had been viewed more than 40 million times across various social media platforms.
In the process, though, Mr. McCabe found himself having to defend some of his practices from Strava purists who noticed that a small number of his diagonal lines — in particular, the stickman’s arms — were suspiciously straight and, at times, created the appearance that Mr. McCabe had run through people’s homes like Ferris Bueller. No, Mr. McCabe said, he did not use Photoshop.
“I’ve had to explain this point about 100,000 times to people,” he said.
Mr. McCabe used a trick of the (Strava) trade. If a user pauses an activity and then moves to another location before resuming, Strava will connect those two points with a straight line. In reality, Mr. McCabe was zigzagging across city blocks to generate those diagonals. The downside, he said, is that he was not credited for those extra kilometers on Strava, or even for the straight lines that it added to the map.
Mr. McCabe also acknowledged that, as he was assembling the final video, he cleaned up a few errant lines — he called them “stray hairs” — and erased several others in an attempt to highlight the hat flip at the end. Otherwise, he said, it would have looked as if the hat were still connected to the stickman’s head.
In any case, all of Mr. McCabe’s runs are in their most pure form on his Strava account, and it might behoove his critics to remember that this is Strava, not the Olympics.
Brian Bell, Strava’s vice president of global communications and social impact, described Mr. McCabe’s video as “a whole new level of ingenuity that anyone can appreciate.”
As for the stickman’s nifty dance moves, Mr. McCabe said that he could not take credit.
“No, that would be my wife,” he said. “My stickman learned everything from her.”
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