A “Strava Mule” Has Come Forward To Confess To His Secret Business And We Can’t Believe This Is Actually Real

Chasing endorphins has become one of the world’s biggest fitness trends in 2024. By that we mean, lacing up your thick soled shoes and strapping on your utility vest for kilometres on kilometres of ~running~.

But the unspoken catch is, you need to share every moment of your running journey. Whether it’s putting up a screenshot of your kilometre splits on your Instagram stories or tracking the whole thing on Strava to post after your run, the activity is incomplete without a social share.

It’s the newest avenue to social clout and the hunger for a Strava Kudos has unearthed a new side hustle.

The sought after Kudos on activity tracking and sharing app Strava is how friends on the platform celebrate and congratulate each other’s achievements. 

Strava “Mules” or ‘Surrogates’ have emerged to help runners obtain the recognition without actually doing the activity. Instead, a ‘”Mule” will be sent out with a paying customer’s Strava account logged into their phone and paid to run in their place.

The customer gets the result they wanted — to share with their friends on Strava — and the ‘Surrogate’ is paid for their time. Entrepreneurship!

After a report was released by Runner’s World earlier this month detailing the lucrative side job, running TikToker Veljko made a video describing how he conducted business as a “Strava Mule” for the past year.

Viewers were quick to question whether his confession was actually real. Regardless, his video has amassed over 500 thousand views and is sparking  conversation about the rise of Strava clout chasers. Will we see the public expansion of the Strava ‘Surrogate’ lifestyle from South East Asia to America? 

Satirical or not — commenters on his video posted to TikTok and Instagram, were also interested to find out how they could build clientele as a Strava “Mule”.

And of course, there were comments about how this trend was “sad” while also being “Black Mirror coded”. Others suggested that the process was a way to create an “alibi” for people lying to their partners.

But the comment that really takes this cake is this:

The lesson we can all learn from this is to trust no one…not even your Strava friends.

It might not even be them hitting those epic PBs.

Would you hire a Strava “Mule”? Or do you think one of your mutuals is using one?

Share your thoughts down in the comments below.