Sweat isn’t so much an antidote to slop as the condition that always, everywhere, undergirds its production.
In the summer of 2022, fighting grad school burnout and making peace with my looming 30s, I leaned into the highly memeified call to train for a half-marathon. Nurtured during the COVID-19 pandemic and sustained by a fraught mix of hype, self-improvement culture and a new cohort of Gen Z fitfluencers, 2020s “third great running boom” promised meaning through routine physical exertion. And I, a dutiful zillennial, answered the call. Several months after sucking down my first Gu, I reluctantly downloaded Strava, the community-powered-fitness -tracking-social-networking platform beloved by endurance athletes both casual and elite. Too cool for wearables, I’d never craved the body stats that seemed so central to the app’s appeal, nor did I need anyone else to know how long my mid-run bathroom stops really were. Eventually, I realized that Strava’s “grade adjusted pace” feature would make me appear just a little bit faster than I really was–at least to myself and the dozen or so friends I knew on the app. It was the first time I saw a flash of data about how my body moved through space and thought sure, rule my life. Now, my weekly mileage and Relative Effort scores feel like proof of existence—as they say, “Strava or it didn’t happen.”
Four years and an additional 80 million users later, Strava continues to thrive amidst a cultural landscape that is both shaped and threatened by digital forgery. An activity-driven and metrics-based social media platform, Strava stakes out a uniquely embodied position within an increasingly disembodied digital ecosystem. As generative AI devours ecosystems from our social media feeds to public education while racking up critical environmental costs, Strava celebrates its role in helping Gen Z trade doomscrolling for real world sweat. Eliding actual perspiration with a moralized ethic, Strava fetishizes sweat as a glimmering and touchable human byproduct that nevertheless relies on digital infrastructures to be shared and thus to matter. Strava’s conflation of irl and ideological sweat is a vital part of the platform’s imaginary: what might be called its sweat ethic. By converting sweat into shareable stats, Strava transfigures the beads on our foreheads into pearls of moral value that evaporate into the digital ether.
Strava specifically wields sweat as a foil to what we now know as “slop,” Merriam-Webster’s inescapable 2025 word of the year for synthetic “digital content of low quality that is produced…by means of artificial intelligence.” Spanning misogynistic feline slop operas to dystopian Trump-era slopaganda, the rise of AI slop has prompted new media literacy campaigns devoted to helping consumers recognize real from fake. As Amy Francombe writes, “seeing used to mean believing. Now it means doubting whatever appears in front of you online. Every image is guilty until proven human.” If slop is fundamentally an assault to the tidiness of truth, then sweat takes on novel stakes as proof of real world embodiment. Strava thus posits sweat as an ethos, a realness test, and a moral economy.
Amidst slop’s aesthetic tyranny, Strava flaunts a community of real people doing effortful things in solidarity. While critics wield slop’s waste status as a pejorative, this slang easily collapses inward on our own appetites. Slop is about what we get served, but it’s also inextricably about our hunger. Perched before our content troughs, we have come to crave and resent the sloppification of daily life simultaneously. Just as we’ve crested past the peak of third wave running hype, we’re launching a new mass fixation with tactility. Countering 2025’s slop–hole, 2026 has been dubbed the “Year of the Analog”; insidiously, much of that trend has entailed using social media to show just how offline we are. “Having a life core” trended on TikTok last fall, rife with clips of users hiking, cycling, and otherwise touching grass: highly Strava-able activities. Strava offers users an alternative narrative about what they produce, what they consume, and who they surround themselves with—one that is not just pious, but with precisely quantified ties to analog life. What better antagonist to “scroll[ing] slack-jawed, like a baby bird waiting for something pre-chewed to drop in” than undeniable proof of physically trying but eventually rewarding Type II fun?
This story propels Strava’s architecture, which shirks “likes” in favor of “kudos”; while the “like” signals a passive affinity for or interest in, “kudos” evokes a pat on the back from a teammate or a coworker. Users emerge as a shoulder-to-shoulder network of sweating bodies bound through real and moralized exertion. “Sweat-posting,” as we might call it, offers a virtuous sociality and makes connecting with others online feel not necessarily more human, but a little less cringe. Textual and photographic documentation are important features of Strava, but far from essential. Posting on Strava demands little in terms of psychic vulnerability and confession (not that disclosing your Zone 2 pace isn’t its own kind of vulnerable). One could get by breezily on the app without creatively revising their automatically titled “Morning Runs” or supplementing their course maps with selfies and still feel like a part of things. Sweat-posting does not entail the same sort of humiliation ritual as uploading daily content to Instagram stories or, God forbid, the grid in the midst of a slop-ridden digital identity crisis. Harnessing growing posting ennui among users who are not paid creators, course-hawking hustle bros, or bots, Strava promises an honest and arguably lower-stakes way to post the everyday. It’s okay again to share our own accruing database of traversed, irl space evidenced not by photos of our toast but by Local Legends. It’s humiliating to self-disclose, but it’s okay–honorable, even, to sweat in unison.
If Strava endorses sweat as tactile proof of exertion, then metrics are the necessary mechanisms of converting sweat from analog to digital space. Your job is fake and your degree means nothing, but you ran 6.33 miles in 1 hour and 1 minute today with an average heart rate of 153bpm, and no one can contest that. In November 2025, Steve Knopper anointed Strava in his NYT editorial as “The Social-Media Platform That Makes You Tell The Truth,” a biometric “data meritocracy” that “creates a sense that you are being measured against something concrete and real.” Loaded notions of meritocracy – that false ideal undergirding the American Dream, the education system, and electoral politics – stud Strava’s average user data report, which claims that Strava users are 2x more likely to be defined as trend setters, 194 percent more likely to be in the highest income segment, and 2.18x more likely to buy products to access the community around them. Strava loudly uplifts its community of sweat-posters as aspirational capitalist subjects.
This moral economy of sweat thrives within the wellness industrial complex’s ick-ridden ecosystem of ableism, classism, fatphobia, and racism. While there are a growing number of athletes working to build more inclusive running spaces and choice influencers committed to unpacking the intersectional politics of running, it’s difficult to untether these influences from Strava’s sweat-posting sociality. Meanwhile, the dehumanizing and bias-ridden qualities of biometric quantification are manifold, complicated further by Strava’s AI-powered Athlete Intelligence feature released in late 2024. Psychological, ethical, and logistical critiques of the Garmins and Apple Watches that many of Strava’s 180 million users sync to the app abound.
Of course, the way people use Strava is far from one-size-fits-all. For every #NoDaysOff acolyte who shudders at a one point downtrend in their Fitness Score, many users have no interest in the meaning of VO2 Max. Instead, a substantial number choose to inhabit Strava in ways that both adapt to and resist its quantifying premise. Most outrageous might be the user who synced giving birth as a nearly 5 hour 37 minute long Strava activity (about an hour over the average woman’s marathon time). To cite personal experience, an anonymous friend downloaded the app to track one .07 mile activity titled “getting a beer from the fridge.” Strava art is its own alternative genre, albeit one celebrated by the platform with its own page highlighting the dragons, huge hearts, and cartoon characters created by users tracing select routes during real life activities. And for users who deprioritize stat supremacy, Strava is a kind of blogspace. Reshaping the platform into a different kind of journalistic archive, these Strava-ers render metrics secondary to the app’s caption and photo features. Recorded activities mark lived time as a feature of creative documentation rather than centering sweat or metrics.
Still, these seemingly transgressive modes of engaging with Strava point to sweat’s ever-extrapolating allure. Amidst dystopian digital artifice, sweat stands to signify any embodied effort, whether it be a 5k or a heart-shaped walk to the beer fridge. Strava art in particular is often evidence of extreme physical exertion, stretching across city lines and equating to whole days of running or cycling. But even seemingly satirically logged activities require embodied movement—one still has to actually walk to the kitchen, and one must have a heart rate while giving birth. And bloglike Strava posts are inevitably distinct in how they wed documentation to the traversal of physical space. As much as they stand to critique the metrics-obsessed lens of data meritocracy, these practices are consistent with mass desires to make digital spaces more real.
Slop and sweat are not so much poison and its antidote as messy co-pollutants. While stats such as heart rate data, weekly mileage, and Relative Effort attempt to gatekeep slop by tracking activity and logging credible human usership, sweat and slop fuse defiantly in the same digital stream. In August 2024, runfluencer @Veljko infamously confessed to working as a “Strava mule,” exposing a real but absurd gig market that entails getting paid 10 to 20 dollars to run races or otherwise impressive routes with someone else’s wearable device, or even multiple people’s devices at once, boosting their metrics. As The Times reported, Strava mules “do [customers’] runs for them as a way of gaining online clout without putting in any actual effort.” In response to the rise of Strava mules, content creator and augmented reality developer Arthur Bouffard created a website called Fake My Run that allows users to post metrics-populated activities without sweating themselves or paying others to sweat for them. As Bouffard explains, all users need to do is draw out a digital marathon in Antarctica, type in their desired pace, and export as a GPX file. Bouffard, the website’s founder, is well aware that “if a run does not exist on Strava or on social media, it might as well not exist at all” and therefore how one of the most quantifiable analog hobbies has become more and more “performative.” This isn’t a new phenomenon; GORPcore has long been critiqued for commodifying outdoorness while violating its ethos through the use of synthetic materials, prioritizing aesthetics over all else; these days, only place many consumers are hiking in their Solomons is down the block to get a matcha.
The mule market and Fake My Run both point to Strava’s larger lie of implacable realness by transgressing its moralized ethos of sweat. Strava mule customers extract real sweat in the form of invisible labor to produce stats alienated from their lived contexts. Meanwhile, as Strava’s data meritocracy positions metrics as clean morsels of truth, fakers like Bouffard expose how statistics can easily become disembodied symbols with no privileged relation to reality; they can even become intentional tools for deception. At the grandest scale, both projects recall the intentionally concealed labor sustaining digital capitalism. Evoking more than just aesthetic performativity, Strava mules recall the human gig work constructing the illusion of frictionless interfaces – think platforms like DoorDash or UberEats, which allow you to order food dropped off at your doorstep without ever interacting with waitstaff, cooks, or delivery personnel. Ultimately, such efforts resist sweat’s troublesome elision with realness, morality, and meritocracy wholesale. Sweat isn’t so much an antidote to slop as the condition that always, everywhere, undergirds its production.
Such projects aside, Strava metrics occupy a tense position between sweat and slop. Besides being objectively fallible, relying on individual factors such as GPS accuracy, even stats risk becoming pointless sludge within the trajectory of platform rot Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification.” More specifically, Doctorow describes the decay of sites like Facebook whose interfaces first appealed specifically to users and then to advertisers, but who now cling to survival by abusing both. This transformation of once beloved digital spaces into “giant piles of shit” overrun by ads and AI drivel signifies a desperate attempt to hoard profits, leading to inevitable fallout in the form of platform death. Slop, sweat, and shit are commingling toxins within digital capitalism’s waste stream: embodied life is transformed into excretions we consume and re-excrete endlessly.
While not yet inundated by celebrity deepfakes or your aunt’s misinformation-graphics, Strava is at risk of getting enshittified too. The app’s “Athlete Intelligence” coaching tool, for instance, has continued to face criticism for comments both quintessentially pandering and just plain absurd. One user who was hit by a car in the middle of a logged bike ride received this post-workout assessment: “Ouch, hope you’re okay after that car accident!….Despite the setback, your activity data shows you’re a consistent, well-rounded athlete—keep up the great work!” And though the platform has enlisted AI to help them spot fake runs, related obstacles like Strava bots and spam accounts persist. As much as they vow to rescue us from synthetic aesthetics and fake work, Strava’s metrics offer no objective formula for streamlining digital sludge, either as shit or as slop.
AI’s tyranny of faux perfection has created a simultaneous aversion to slop and a hunger for genuine human messes. As the so-called Year of the Analog continues to unfold, we may well witness a more mainstream resistance to stats altogether that compromises Strava’s sweat-posting model. The optimization culture closely tied to running’s third great boom may contain the paradoxical seeds of its own deconstruction. $18 salads are wellness-maxxing, macro-approved solutions to capitalist time, but they’re also slop bowls. It feels empowering to trade goo for Gu, though both are different kinds of sludge. And so, of course, is sweat. When we sweat, we boast not only shiny proof of exertion, but a living secretion belonging to and made by us: embodied human waste. Already, optimization fatigue in the fitness space has prompted a reactionary wave of wellness anarchy that attempts to marry discipline and indulgence; now we’re supposed to run 13.1 miles and then go to Berghain. Fusing paradoxical cultural desires, wellness anarchy combines the labor of sweat and aestheticized, party-forward nihilism—in other words, getting sloppy. Even more than truth, virtuousness, or the cherished kudo, perhaps what we long for most when we post our sweat online is a slop that feels more like our own.
Sarah Sgro is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Communication at Warren Wilson College and born-again poet. You can find her running around Asheville, NC irl and on Strava. Her favorite flavor of Gu is Campfire S’mores.
Article illustration by Carolyn Jao for MTC