O the list of quirky things, I didn’t have “Strava bans user for running in North Korea” on my bingo card today. But here we are. I’ve just spent the last hour going down the rabbit hole that is the Pyongyang Marathon (in North Korea), and it turns out – it’s a thing. As in, as thing that outsiders come and run. There’s even an official website for it. In fact, there’s been 31 editions of it. And over 1,000 foreigners run in it and the affiliated running events each year, including plenty of diplomats such as the then British Ambassador to North Korea.
The event has been happening for decades, but that’s actually not what got this person their account banned. Rather, they were there for a trip because they are working on their doctorate about North Korea, while there, went on a run, then came home (to a different country). After which, they upload their run to Garmin Connect, which then synced it to Strava. Finally, Strava then sent them a note that their account was being ter
Last month, a person did a treadmill run where their virtual run location was set as North Korea. Guess what? Their account too was banned. Albeit, after contacting support, the company eventually re-instated it – but clearly Strava has some pretty funky rules in place around uploading activities related to North Korea. What’s strange here though is that it’s not simply hiding the workout, but straight-up deleting the account. Which obviously, makes no sense – so, I did what I do best: Dig into it.
!!!Now, before we go too far, let’s just take two seconds to do a quick explainer on North Korea travel. In a nutshell, there are tour operators that operate trips to North Korea. Depending on your citizenship, it is actually not illegal for people to go to North Korea within one of those tour operator trips. These trips are *highly* controlled, and generally speaking give outsider’s a positive impression of North Korea, generally only featuring the lives of elite families. They would rightly be called propaganda. Equally though, they are one of the few windows into society in North Korea, polished and skewed as it might be. Perhaps the best balance of a video I’ve seen recently was this one published just 10 days ago, with over 5 million views. Again, I’m definitely not here to endorse you (or me) going to North Korea!!!
Instead, I’m here to illuminate an absolutely bonkers automated system that Strava has, backed by an even more unexplain
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