If anyone doubted the digital age’s capacity for producing unexpected folk art, the ongoing adventures of GPS “artists” might serve as persuasive evidence. An amalgam of committed athletes, whimsical path planners, and accidental pranksters have emerged, wielding their GPS trackers to leave indelible (if virtual) marks—ranging from canine tributes to monumental phalluses—spread across the landscapes of Europe and beyond. As The Guardian’s feature highlights, it’s Strava, the fitness app, that has largely enabled this peculiar form of endurance-based doodling to blossom, inspiring efforts that run the gamut from family bonding to topographical innuendo.
When the Topography and Place Names Lend a Hand (or Something Else)
Few creations embody the intersection of geography, anatomy, and British place names like Terry Rosoman’s 72-mile Welsh epic. Rosoman detailed to The Guardian how his route, devised as part of a mental health awareness fundraiser, took him and his GPS tracker on a course shaped uncannily like a penis—culminating, as fate would have it, in a village named Three Cocks. The seed for this giant phallus run was first sown when Rosoman sought to mark Men’s Health Awareness Month with an eye-catching feat, having noticed several, albeit much smaller, examples of GPS anatomy art online. Determined to outdo prior creations, he mapped a route climbing nearly 10,000 feet along Offa’s Dyke, playfully working in the classic anatomical flourishes and, with a nod to serendipity, passing directly through Three Cocks itself.
Rosoman explained that local support made the ordeal bearable—friends met him en route, his brother supplied encouragement right “on the tip,” and he finished wrapped in a Welsh flag before being awarded a 3D-printed trophy that left nothing to the imagination. The feat was immortalized not just in fond family memories (his mother honored him with a matching “cake” for his 40th birthday) but also in a surprise pop culture cameo as a question on “Have I Got News for You.” Rosoman dryly confessed, as quoted in the article, that dominating Google results for “world’s biggest penis” wasn’t quite as straightforward as one might wish.
Charting Portraits, Predators, and Pets
Yet GPS artistry is hardly all about irreverence—or the vaguely anatomical. Take Samppa Tölli of Finland, who spoke to The Guardian about pulling out his skates to trace a 16-kilometer great white shark across the frozen expanse of Lake Hiidenvesi. Skating with a GPS watch is tricky, Tölli noted, since keeping an eye on your coordinates requires swinging your arm in front of your face (not ideal for navigation, especially on a foggy, uneven surface). Tölli admitted the route wasn’t without missteps—turning too soon out of the shark’s mouth forced a quick retrace and improvised gills—but the sheer scale and novelty of his icy illustration eventually won him new online followers and pushed him to further experiments, including an eagle and a single-line woman sketched on two wheels after snow rendered skating impossible.
On a different continent, Frank Chan recounted for The Guardian how, approaching middle age and under the calming spell of distance running, he fell for the meditative weirdness of Strava mapping. Chan’s GPS portfolio includes everything from the instantly-recognizable sleeve of Chappell Roan’s debut album, traversed almost 75 kilometers through San Francisco’s grid, to portraits of Whitney Houston and the Pet Shop Boys. As Chan described, collaborating with fellow Strava artist Lenny Maughan for a recreation of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam required careful choreography—Chan on one side of the city, Maughan on the other, each “drawing” a divine limb. He acknowledged the fragility of the endeavor: “There’s a certain degree of uncertainty with Strava mapping when running near tall buildings,” leading to minor but visible glitches—such as an unintended tongue on a Britpop legend.
In addition, The Guardian included the sentimental account of Chiara Franzosi, who crafted a 60-kilometer outline of her cocker spaniel, Miles, leaping over the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh. Franzosi explained that during pandemic lockdowns, she turned to creating GPS art both as motivation and as a way to capture something personally meaningful. Her challenge was in translating Edinburgh’s mix of industrial, straight-lined neighborhoods and winding hills into a recognizable—if charmingly childlike—canine figure. Despite losing her way on her dog’s tail in the snowy chaos, Franzosi finished the run in just over six hours and still considers the oddball rendering a fitting tribute to Miles.
Drawing Hearts, Breaking Records, Building Memories
As The Guardian also recounts, not all GPS art is solitary. In France, Frédéric de Lanouvelle and his daughter Mathilde took up the challenge, inspired by a colleague’s story of cyclists creating a 1,025km dinosaur. The father-daughter duo upped the ante by pedaling a tandem bicycle a staggering 2,162 kilometers in the shape of an immense cartoon heart, starting and ending in Lyon. The undertaking—undertaken largely for charity—aimed to raise funds for children’s heart surgeries through Mécénat Chirurgie Cardiaque, resulting in two operations funded and, as de Lanouvelle recalled, the deeply rewarding experience of meeting one beneficiary in person.
Mechanical failures struck five days in, but local mechanics and well-wishers rallied to patch the bike and spirits alike. The world record for GPS art by bicycle was officially theirs (briefly, before being unseated by Olympic rings), though, as de Lanouvelle told the outlet, it was the time together and the memories made—not the record itself—that mattered most.
Endurance, Mischief, and the Modern Cartographer
The appeal of GPS art seems to reside in its improbable mix: technological precision collides with human error and improvisation; athletic discipline shares the lane with a pronounced sense of playfulness. As subjects in The Guardian’s feature repeatedly emphasize, it is as much the process—the mistakes, backtracks, foggy mornings, and unexpected place names—as the completed image that defines the adventure. There’s a universal appeal in the notion of “leaving your mark,” however temporarily, whether that mark is a giant heart, a retrievable dog, or the world’s largest GPS phallus rolling through Three Cocks village.
The trickiness of mapping a spaniel’s tail in a snowstorm or keeping a pop singer’s eyes aligned across a city-sized canvas gives these exploits both humility and humor. And just maybe, as these artists-come-athletes discover, a marathon (or two, or ten) can be all the more rewarding when the payoff is recognition, laughter, or simply remembering the landscape from a more novel—if slightly skewed—angle.
Is this the 21st-century answer to cave painting, or just a running joke with impressive cardiovascular benefits? The route is always open, and the next masterpiece may well lie in an unassuming town with a name destined for double takes.
