Don came through and spotted a rough pixelated animal head shape - maybe a lion? - in Midtown. I gave him a virtual high five and ran with the idea. I signed up for a premium version of ridewithgps.com and went to town on refining my Midtown Lion head. I decided to expand the design into Brooklyn & Queens by adding a body and tail.

One Strava Art protip technique I learned from Stephen Lund is that when you pause your GPS device mid-ride and unpause it somewhere else, a straight line is drawn in Strava connecting the two points. I used this technique to connect the lion head to its hind quarters across the East River. The rest was just a patience-testing series of endless turns and double-backs to create the lines that comprise the lion. Another tip I learned from my earlier attempts is that it’s important to turn off the autopause and re-route features in your GPS computer. This forces the device to prompt you precisely as you planned out in advance.

It took longer than I thought to execute the 31 mile route (which in actuality is longer due to the “off Strava” riding over the Williamsburg bridge and Queensboro bridge required to connect the dots). Three hours in total, not including the miles to and from the start of the ride from my apartment in the Bronx. In the end, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.