Why this Toronto man ran so a giant stickman could dance – CP24

His colleagues asked Duncan McCabe if he was training for a marathon, but in reality, the 32-year-old accountant devoted several hours of his week, for 10 months, to running in style on the same few streets of West Toronto with absolutely no race in the lead.

All this in order to create a seconds-long animation of a dancing stickman for Strava.

This is a phone app that allows athletes to track their running activity. Strava has been home to some running stylistic artwork before – the company has even highlighted some of its Favorite Strava works – but McCabe wanted to go the extra mile and turn his routes into a 30-second, self-paced cartoon. The “Purple Hat” by Sofi Tukker. After all, he was already producing and editing videos for his YouTube channel as a hobby – why not try your hand at creating a simple animation?

“I knew the video market wasn’t being tapped, so I thought, ‘Let’s just try to merge my two worlds: running with video,'” McCabe told CTV News Toronto in an interview Tuesday.

About 120 races later, McCabe’s hat-twirling stick figure came to life – with his arms wiggling through the villages of Bloorcourt and Harbord, his legs dancing across Trinity Bellwoods Park.

The accountant said he used Toronto’s grid-like street system to his advantage, using street names to mark where the stick figure’s imaginary spine is, for example.

“If he walks, that is, he pretends to move his legs, I literally move every day which street represents his spine, and he remains stable in the center of the frame, but the card below he moves,” McCabe said.

“I had to plan based on the rhythms of Sofi Tukker’s song, when he was going to turn, when he was going to walk. I could see it taking shape, especially every day as I dragged and dropped my screenshots into my final timeline, and so that was definitely 100% the main motivation.

While McCabe had to constantly check his phone to make sure he would stay on track to keep his stick figure in shape, he said he attended an occasional inning of a minor league baseball game at Christie Pits Park – that, and several cats.

“I got to see a lot of cats. I recognized the cats, I did these routes so often,” McCabe said.

“I didn’t want to lose this race”

Rain or shine, McCabe channeled his inner David Goggins to stay motivated – he said that even though it “seemed crazy,” he had to keep going. McCabe pointed out one race in particular where it was raining heavily.

“I can’t stop because I’m 80 percent done, my man, but I can’t move from there because I don’t want to mess up the line, and my finger is so wet I can’t do pause or unmute the smartphone,” McCabe said.

“I’m just standing on a street corner, in shorts, in a torrential downpour, nowhere to hide – I was at college somewhere – and I was just trying to push this button, and I felt so stupid because, like, I don’t know. , it just seemed crazy – I had to finish it because I didn’t want to lose this race.

For months, the only comments McCabe said he would hear would be from his wife, giving him words of encouragement like, “That was a good stickman today, well done.” »

Even when McCabe initially posted his gyrating character, he said he didn’t get much public reaction — just a handful of likes in the first three days.

Then he said he woke up one Friday morning and saw that the clip had been reshared on X, formerly Twitter, and had been viewed millions of times.

Brian Bell, Strava’s vice president of global communications and social impact, told CTV News Toronto via email that McCabe’s planning and effort to complete 121 series to create this cartoon is inspiring.

“At Strava, we are continually amazed by the creativity of our community. Strava Art is just one example of the incredible feats our users accomplish on the platform, and this particular moving animation is a whole new level of ingenuity that everyone can appreciate,” Bell wrote.

McCabe called the amount of recognition and support he has received so far “incredible” and “overwhelming.”

“A lot of people really understand how much work it is, because at first glance you might not think it, it just seems like an entertainment on the road, but when you think about it, if it s t’s five frames – like five stickmen per second – each second of content requires 50 or 60 kilometers of running. If I want just one second of content, I have to run more than a marathon per second,” McCabe said.

Sofi Tukker even noticed his efforts from miles away, reacting to his video in a post on TikTok.

“@Strava what if we gathered all the runners and created a video clip of their runs… runners… are you down?” » says the video’s caption, raising the question of whether we can expect more Strava-powered animations in the near future.