Crafting a running route is a delicate process, especially in a city like San Francisco: you’ve got to find somewhere safe and scenic, avoid the crowds and decide how many hills you want to conquer. One runner in the city, however, is making things even more complicated – with beautiful results.
For the past four years, Lenny Maughan has been turning his routes into art. His paths through the city are carefully chosen so that, viewed on a map, they form illustrations of everything from a simple heart shape to the starship Enterprise. So far he’s made 53 works – including, most recently, an unmistakable image of the artist Frida Kahlo that made a splash on Reddit and in local media.
Maughan didn’t set out to be a running artist. But as route-tracking apps became popular, runners began to notice images in their pathways, “kind of like a Rorschach test”, he told the Guardian. The immediate impulse among many runners was, inevitably, to draw penises: “That’s where it all began,” he said. “But I wanted to do something different and something original.”
His first project was the Vulcan hand gesture from Star Trek, inspired by the 2015 death of Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock. “I just printed out a paper map and sketched a hand shape along Market Street and the other fingers, thumb and wrist came pretty easily,” he said. Next up was a television, in the area that helped give birth to the TV set. Then a giant Batman logo, encompassing much of the city: “The larger you go, the more fine-tuned you can make the shape.”
Indeed, creating Frida Kahlo required a 28.9-mile run. Maughan tracks his paths using the running app Strava, which means you, too, can run in the shape of the celebrated Mexican artist’s face. If you’re as fit as Maughan, it will take you six hours and eight minutes.
The tracking process is high-tech, but the whole thing starts with just a pen and paper. “When I was a kid everyone thought I’d be an artist when I grew up – I was always drawing things,” he said. He was a particular fan of the Etch-a-Sketch, which has something in common with his current work: both require creating images in an unbroken line.
Maughan has lived in San Francisco for more than 20 years, and many of his images happen to have a connection to the region. He has run in the shape of California; the Grateful Dead guitarist’s Jerry Garcia’s hand, missing part of the middle finger; and a firefighter’s helmet and axe, to honor first responders amid wildfires.
But such local links are just coincidental, he said. His goal is to create images anyone can recognize: “This is just a way to make the streets my own.”
