Exploring the assignment bank for this week, one assignment that really jumped out at me was the Nike Run GPS Map art assignment. I am an avid runner and have been for most of my life. I consider myself to be an extremely athletic person and have run/played sports for most of my life. So when I saw this assignment allowed me to get credit for something I do every day as well as be fun and creative, I was all in!!

The guidelines for this assignment were pretty straightforward. The objective of this assignment was to create “running art.” The assignment instructed me to download the Free Nike Run app on my smart phone, and simply just go for a run and try my best to create a GPS image of where I ran.

Personally, I had never thought before of creating art out of my runs. As I said, I run a lot. And if I run outside, I always use a running app such as Nike Run. After reading this assignment, I looked through my old runs to see if any somewhat resembled something I could rerun and turn into an image. But unless a bunch of squiggly, circles count as art, I had nothing.

The first step of this assignment was for me to figure out what I wanted to create. I started thinking of fun things I could create, such as the words 007 to fit our secret agent theme or maybe running to create an image of my favorite animal (which is an elephant as you should know if you looked at my introduction posts!!). I quickly realized these were pretty ambitious pictures and that I maybe should start easier.

That is why I finally came up with an idea of what image I should create: a a stick figure running!!

Once I had a clear image in my mind of what I wanted to create, I then used my Under Armour Fitness App to map my run. For anyone who is interested in creating art for their run or even running more in general, I highly recommend this app!! It’s really user-friendly and is similar to the Nike Free Run app in many ways. I use the Under Armour version becasue I actually have a tracker that connects with the app I wear in my shoe that tracks my runs so I thought using this app would be helpful to create my run art!

Using the plan my run feature on the app, I mapped out exactly where I was going to run in order to hopefully somewhat create something that resembled a man running. Once I mapped my run, the next step was to simply just run!

I have never considered myself an artsy person….. my attempt at making Nike Run GPS Map Art is definitely proof of this.

Which leads me to my masterpiece. It’s a bit abstract so you might have to use you are imagining, but what I hope you all are seeing is a self-portrait of me running!!!

Overall, I had a lot of fun doing this assignment. Usually when I go out a run, I just run in a circle and make a loop. But the process of mapping my run beforehand to (hopefully) create an image was really fun to do and actually made me enjoy my run and run faster as I couldn’t wait to see my creation at the end! I think this assignment actually might have started a new fitness hobby of mine.

For this assignment, we had to go on a run and document it via a running app.

I used my Apple Watch GPS tracking to track the run and then took a screenshot of the completed run. I completed 6.25 miles around University of Mary Washington.

I wasn’t able to create a detailed image, but it sort of looks like the outline of buildings. Let me know what you think it looks like in the comments.