Wife’s Strava ‘stalkers’ inspire crime writer’s thriller

‘ It wouldn’t take much before you could look up someone’s patterns of when they run, where they live’

A BESTSELLING crime author whose wife was stalked via the running app Strava has used her experience as the plot of his next novel.

Novelist Peter James, 71, based his thriller I Follow You on the experience of his wife Lara, 41, a keen marathon runner, who discovered that a man she once waved at on a training run began to run the same routes at similar times to her shortly afterwards.

“It was really quite creepy,” said Mrs James, who often ran from the couple’s country home in the West Sussex village of Woodmancote, near Brighton.

“I thought this could be really dangerous if that guy was awful or a stalker. It wouldn’t take much before you could look up someone’s patterns of when they run, where they live, when they’re away.”

When she first told her husband in 2017 that someone might be using her exercise routines to stalk her, he saw the literary possibilities.

“There’s a lot to love about Strava,” the novelist said. “But it’s always there, that potential for misuse, which I’ve obviously exploited in the book.” More than 50 million runners, cyclists and swimmers worldwide post details of their training on Strava which allows data to be uploaded from GPS devices.

Users of the app can choose to keep their data private, but on default mode it is available to anyone.

Mrs James first noticed something amiss three years ago during an evening run. “I was quite new to the Strava app,” she told The Sunday Times. “I was running down country lanes and I saw this guy with a rucksack on. I waved and didn’t think much more of it.”

Returning home, she looked at Strava and used a feature that identifies other runners who may have crossed her path. One of them displayed a picture of the man with a rucksack. She compared his posts with her own daily runs, and realised that he occasionally followed her exact routes.

One year later, after the couple moved to Jersey in the Channel Islands, she had another similar experience.

“During one of my runs along the seafront, I overtook this guy running,” she said. “We said hi, and he told me he was training for the marathon. I ran on and didn’t think anything of it.”

No sooner had she got home than her phone pinged with a message from Strava, telling her the man had become one of her followers.

Although the Strava app offers security precautions, including “privacy zones” which can shield the start and end points of each excursion to prevent the identification of addresses, these measures are not always activated and the routines adopted by many regular exercisers can leave users vulnerable.