Nature
PUBLISHED
Recently, I did the unthinkable and took up jogging, and I was quite proud of myself when I finally hit the 5-kilometer milestone (3.1 miles, in units that make it seem like less of a big deal).
But, putting that in perspective, a hamster named Mollie has been running twice that distance night after night, and the evidence has even been logged on Strava.
Strava, for the uninitiated, is an app on which you can log your exercise (typically running and cycling), share that activity with friends, and encourage or compete with one other.
Runners often post GPS maps of their routes, with some getting creative and turning the streets into an enormous drawing canvas. They also occasionally reveal the locations of secret military installations.
As a fun little side project, physicist and keen runner Thijs de Buck decided he would begin tracking his hamster's movements at night, simply because he was intrigued about the sort of distances he would see in the morning.
While not the most difficult of projects, especially when your day job is in physics, it still required a little technical know-how.
"The main parts are an ESP32 [chip] attached to a hall sensor, which I positioned close to the wheel," de Buck explained on Reddit.
"Using a magnet attached to the back of the wheel, this tells the ESP32 when a full rotation has completed. It gives a timestamp (and total distance) to each magnet-pass, which is stored on the network."
Using a Python script, this is then uploaded to the hamster's nearly 15k-strong following on Strava the following morning, with a title generated from a list of options.
As well as this, there are a couple of manual steps, including uploading a photo of the hamster, and of course, "Mollie had to do the running."
As it turns out, there's quite a lot of running going on. The account logs around 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) every night. These aren't one constant run, however, with the little critter taking regular breaks to stay hydrated.
Despite being on the platform for only a short time a short time, Mollie has easily achieved the August run 100k challenge and set a personal best of 10.63 km (6.6 miles) in a respectable 4 hours 17 minutes.
“I really believe he’ll be able to exceed that soon,” de Buck added to Runner's World, a stark wakeup call for the rest of the jogging community.
