Hi everyone.
To briefly explain the situation: Chipotle currently have a set of running challenges in various cities around the world on Strava. The person completing the highest number of reps (and sitting as local legend) at the end of this month is set to win a year of free burritos.
I love running but I really love Chipotle, so I made it my goal to compete as best as possible in my city. I have been running more weekly miles than ever before, all on a 0.2 mile street downtown, an hour away from my house and with road crossings. I have rearranged the schedule of my life in order to give this a real go and I have gone everyday since I started competing except for 1 day (today).
Sadly, however, there is someone that I’m ‘competing’ against that seemingly isn’t playing fair. I have very good reason to believe that this person is cheating. Their profile is private so this is the information I gleaned from the Leaderboards. I’ll outline the reasons below:
Their first run I could see had “Garmin fenix” on the device as well as HR data however all the subsequent runs were uploaded by “Strava GPX” and had no elevation or HR data.
But what was most shocking was there were two runs uploaded that were supposed to have occurred on different days, but the GPS tracks look exactly the same as each other despite there being high rise buildings. I have never seen two runs look so similar before.
To my shock, I found a 3rd run that matched the same pattern on someone else’s profile who is competing in the challenge.
So I overlaid all three GPX files together and they are almost identical, except the distance varies by a little less than 0.2 miles. Here is a close-up of the 3 runs overlaid on top of each other:
After I flagged the runner I got blocked and so did my partner.
Another suspicious thing to me is that I have seen 3 other people completing the challenge in person as well as 2-3 people from the days’ leaderboard since going to the segment. I’ve logged 60 miles on the 0.2 stretch of road. There are many days where the current LL added a run for the same time that I was there. I have not seen him.
With all of these factors being present, along with the consistency of their occurrence, it’s basically becoming difficult for me to draw any other conclusion than that of cheating.
In terms of my quest for justice, I have so far done the following:
- Reached out to Strava support (open case)
- Reached out to Chipotle (was told to reach out to Strava)
I worry about hitting a dead end and I’m not sure where else to go.
So the two main reasons I’m posting here (other than to vent) are: A) To see if other people think this is quite clearly cheating and B) To see if anyone has any suggestions as to how this can be remedied and for the competition to continue in a fair way.
Thanks for any/ all help!
