Anyone who spotted the run Tom Vickery uploaded to exercise tracking app Strava on 18 February last year might have been a little confused. The 30-minute sprint appeared to have taken place right in the middle of the Channel, not far from Guernsey and heading towards the west coast of France. The run was also, curiously, a ruler-straight line, appearing on Vickery’s public profile as an unbending, inch-long streak of orange in the blue swathe of the app’s virtual sea. Oh, and it was at a world record-breaking pace.
Of course, anyone who knows Vickery wouldn’t have been surprised at all. The 38-year-old triathlon coach from Cambridge was on a two-day ferry trip to Bilbao for a holiday and this rather speedy jog was simply another run on his then nearly four-year daily running streak on Strava. Determined not to break his streak on board the ship, Vickery had risen at 5am to run up and down the deck for his allotted 30 minutes, and the boat’s progress through the water meant he appeared to be running faster than any long-distance runner in the world.
This is just one example of the lengths some people will go to, to maintain a “streak”. A streak is something – anything, really – that happens over a period of time without a break. It’s a type of gamification – the process of adding game-like elements to tasks to make them more appealing. Possibly the most famous “streaker” was British runner Ron Hill, who ran every day for 52 years and 39 days (that’s 19,032 days in a row), even popping out for a jog the day after breaking his sternum in a car accident in 1993.
Hill, a scientist, logged every run in his diary but, these days, technology allows us to record streaks in a more streamlined, user-friendly manner. On Snapchat, for example, the term “streak” has become part of the lexicon: a “snapstreak” is the number of days in a row you’ve sent a “snap” – either a picture or a message – to a fellow user. To keep a snapstreak alive, users must send their snaps within a 24-hour period. If not, the streak dies.
Streaks of any kind can become all-consuming. One parent I spoke to told me her daughter is “addicted” to her two-year long snapstreak, and someone else admitted they’re “desperate” not to lose their streak on the language-learning app Duolingo. According to gamification expert Kimba Cooper-Martin, our love of streaks taps into something primitive within us. Humans, she says, love streaking because of a concept called loss aversion. “Humans are often more motivated by the fear of losing something than by the prospect of gaining something new,” she says.
Vickery’s streak began on 11 August 2019, triggered by a series of challenges in his personal life. His marriage was falling apart and, despite being a keen triathlete, he was struggling to motivate himself to train unless he sensed the pressure of a looming event. “I felt like all the plates I was spinning were falling down around me and breaking,” he says. “So the thinking was: let’s just get one plate spinning well.” He decided to run at least 30 minutes every day for a month. That month turned into two, then two turned into three. Just over five years later, he’s still going.
He has maintained his streak throughout the Covid pandemic, the end of his marriage, moving cities and jobs, and – because he’s a sucker for punishment, apparently – after doing Ironmans, 100-mile ultramarathons, and epic week-long cycling adventures, where he was pedalling about 100 miles a day. He tells me about one such day: he’d been cycling in the rain from 9am to 9pm, arrived at his B&B for the night, then swapped his cleated shoes for trainers and headed out just after 10pm to complete a run. “Running around in the darkness like that was mentally quite hard,” he says. “But I just thought: ‘I’ve got to do it.’”
The overwhelming, overriding need to maintain a streak, even after 12 sodden hours of cycling, is, Cooper-Martin says, also fuelled by the fact that we can now not only record our streaks but also share them with others. “Everyone understands what a streak is and many apps include features to share and celebrate your progress on social media. This allows others to help cheer you on, extending that hit of dopamine even further.”
For some streakers that dopamine hit is, really, all they now get from their streaks. Alison Nicholson, 55, started using Duolingo on and off during lockdown after moving to Andalusia in 2017 and, at time of writing, was on a 1,307-day streak. “I don’t feel as if I’m really getting any benefit from it now as the practice sessions are very similar each day but I can’t bear the thought of throwing away such a long streak,” she says. When it comes to practising her Spanish, Nicholson admits that chatting to her neighbours is more helpful.
Maya Middlemiss, 53, gets a lot more from hers on the journalling app Day One where you can upload written thoughts and images. As I write, she is on a 1,541-day streak. She says it helps her look back on what she was thinking or how she was feeling in years gone by, even if her entries remind her of unpleasant events. “There is a streak of two to three weeks in early 2022 where every day was just another picture of a lateral flow test or a thermometer reading,” she says. “I couldn’t write or think during that time but still took a photo of something to mark how small my world had become.”
Middlemiss loves her streak and feels anything but trapped by it. “It’s my choice to do it.” She hasn’t gone to any extreme lengths to maintain it, unlike Wordle fan Lisa Ingram, 60, who drove a mile out of her village during a powercut just so she could get a signal to do the puzzle and hold on to the streak. “Even I thought I was being a bit mad,” she admits.
Some people can find themselves trapped by the pressure of maintaining a streak. According to psychotherapist Susie Masterson, streaking can be affirming, helping us build resilience and seek healthy rewards, but it can also have a negative effect on our wellbeing as we become competitive with ourselves to the point of obsession. “If the streak becomes the focus and not the learning or self-improvement aspect, it taps into our negative beliefs,” she says. “For example, if one of our core beliefs is ‘I’m not good enough’, this will motivate us to keep going with a streak to try to avoid the emotions associated with this belief.”
But maintaining the streak, she says, isn’t enough to counter these negative thoughts. “This ends up with us feeling trapped, both in a streak but also in a cycle of negative beliefs.”
Masterson says, too, that streaking can lead to compulsive behaviours, especially when we’re tracking streaks with apps such as Wordle, Duolingo, or Strava. “My clients often talk about not being able to stop checking their streak,” she says. “If you are no longer getting the reward, then it demonstrates a shift in your relationship with it. This can start to become obsessive, even addictive.”
Cooper-Martin agrees, saying that if your streak is causing you excessive anxiety to the point that you are neglecting other areas of your life in order to maintain it, it might be time to reassess. “It’s important to remember that streaks are tools meant to serve you, not control you,” she says.
James Bore has tried multiple times to break free from his streak on Duolingo. The 41-year-old, who runs a cybersecurity consultancy, started using the app after a trip to Paris made him want to improve his French. “It quickly became more of an obligation than anything else. The app’s persistent nagging worked to make me keep the streak going,” he says. “Eventually, I wasn’t learning anything new and was resenting the time wasted keeping the streak up but couldn’t bring myself to stop, after keeping it going for over a year.”
Bore realised he was only keeping the lessons up because of a “vague anxiety” about the streak being broken. He did quit a couple of times but was soon back on Duolingo. “The app is very good at pulling you back in by allowing you to repair your streak with extra lessons and nagging you until you do,” he says. “Each time I managed to break it, the guilt that the nagging caused managed to hook me back in. I even uninstalled it once but reinstalled it the next day.”
Bore finally broke his streak during a holiday – to Paris – with his wife. “I decided to just switch my phone off until we got back. After the first couple of days I felt relief,” he says. “When I finally did turn it back on and got the notification about my streak being broken, I just uninstalled the app without a second thought.”
Not everyone streaks on purpose, though. “Many of us unintentionally get caught up in a streak,” says Masterson. Paulomi Debnath, 44, has shared a kiss with her husband every day before work for 18 years unless they’re travelling. “We didn’t do it consciously,” she says, saying the tradition is now a happy habit. “It’s something we enjoy and cherish. It’s such a sweet habit that you don’t want to break it.”
Masterson advises anyone who accidentally finds themselves in a streak to ask themselves the questions: “What am I getting out of this? How does it make me feel? Does it enhance or impact my daily routine?” For Debnath, her streak, though unintentional, is definitely life-enhancing. “It has become part of my daily ritual.”
Certainly, Vickery, on that ferry in the middle of the English Channel, battling his way through a series of personal upheavals one run at a time, was finding his (very intentional) streak to be of significant benefit to his mental health. “I’ve never been depressed,” he says. The sense of purpose and achievement that comes with each run keeps him going.
As a triathlete coach, he knows that running as regularly as he does isn’t advisable. In fact, conventional wisdom is that rest days are as important as run days. “I ran at the weekend and did some really hard mountain-running and, with my coaching hat on, the best thing for me is movement but not necessarily running,” he says, adding that a swim or a light cycle ride would be preferable.
But the lure of the streak is so intense that he simply can’t bring himself to break it. He does what he can to limit the effect on his body – running some of the way off-road to avoid pavement-pounding and even running on a treadmill with increased gradient to reduce the impact and move the stress to different muscle groups. But he concedes that you won’t find many professionals who train as he does. He says, too, that his lifestyle makes it easier for him to streak. “I’m quite time-positive in my life,” he says. “I don’t have kids or a real job.”
In fact, his main concern is not sickness or injury but that, one day, he might need to fly to somewhere as far as Australia and wouldn’t be able to fit a run into a daylong flight. “What would I do?” Run up and down the aisle of the plane, I suggest. How would Strava log that one? He could run laps around the layover airport, he thinks. It wouldn’t stop him going, he says, not entirely convincingly, but it would give him pause for thought. Ultimately, he says, the only thing that would stop the streak is if he was so injured that continuing it would do irreparable damage. “It would feel like a loss,” he says.
Later, after his daily run, he messages me. “Stopping would feel like a ‘did not finish’ in a race,” he says. He’s not entirely clear what “finishing” will look like but he would like it to be on his terms: a 10-year celebration, maybe. Or on his 40th birthday. “I’m proud of myself,” he adds, “for how far I’ve got.”
