The Strava Challenge – the Nazkian way

How can we motivate our colleagues to be more active now autumn is right around the corner? With a challenge of course! In the beginning of September we started a Strava Challenge with the following goal: bike, walk, run, whatever as many times as possible the distance of the Belgian border. No, it is not a competition, we are in this together and will bridge the distance by means of a joint effort.

We know from this blog that the length of a boundary is a relative thing. Athletes need a clear goal to focus on, therefore we use the boundary of Belgium with the most detail available in the Boundaries-API as a reference. One lap around Belgium means tackling a distance of 1498,7 km.

On this map you can track our progress and see where we are on the Belgian border. We left on 1 September in De Panne. Do you want to cheer us on?

It is very easy to create this interactive map with our Mapframe demo. Have a look at demo.mapframe.be and try it out yourself! What you need to make this map:

• The Belgian border in GeoJSON format
• Your programming language of choice
• A background map to display the data on

You can get the boundary data of any European country from our Boundaries-API for free. This data is of the type MultiPolygon. For our use case, we need a line (type LineString). It is an easy conversion, but make sure not to skip this step. You can always check whether your updated GeoJSON is correct by using the data panel of the Mapframe demo.

We need to cut this line to show the current progress along the border. This is the tricky bit. We use a little script that loops over every coordinate pair in the GeoJSON while keeping track of the total distance travelled between them. Once we hit our Strava-number, we stop the loop and make a new LineString with all coordinate pairs up to that point. This new GeoJSON now shows our distance travelled along the border of Belgium. Finally, we add a little marker to indicate our current whereabouts.

You can pick any background map to display this GeoJSON on. We use our trusty  Mapframe demo to choose between multiple mapping libraries and base maps. Good luck trying this yourself and feel free to contact us if you need help!

Curious where we will end up at the end of September?