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Welcome to Quench'd, a weekly story series for cyclists and adventurers. We hope these stories make you smile, learn something new, and show you a new perspective. To see past Quench'd stories, head to our library here.

Josh Lynott is an Australian multi-disciplined creative. Based in Melbourne, his work explores the threshold between athletic & artistic worlds through modes of exploration such as, but not limited to, ultra-running, poetry, photography, and painting.

Strava can certainly be a fun platform, a way to keep up with friends' adventures, but we never like to get too bogged down in the metrics. Our focus has always been just having fun outside, and so when we saw this post by Josh Lynott, we resonated with it a lot and wanted to hear more! Enjoy this story by Josh about having more fun on your runs!

I struggle to remember more than five of my best childhood memories. As the years go by, my favourite moments become increasingly blurred. It feels as if each time I retrieve a story from my brain's filing cabinet, I inevitably change and obscure the details slightly. Memory is a funny thing, right?

So, it makes me curious... What are your top five favourite runs of all time? Sit with that momentarily, and perhaps even write it down. My favourite runs have little to do with the number of kudos I received or my average GAP for the uphill segments I ran. Strava is a brilliant platform. It promotes movement and accountability and is an inspiring place to view your friends’s adventures. Like most other social media platforms, Strava is optimised (I'm sure they won't admit it) for extremes and 'clickbait' content. Fast splits and overly long runs often receive the most kudos. Humans love going fast and love teetering on the edge of exhaustion - especially if they can activate the "dopamine multiplier" with a few added "thumbs up" from their online counterparts.

As much as I love running fast and lots of kudos (I'm not immune), my true mission is to slow the world down. As far as I know, one of the best ways to slow down is by having fun. Fun brings us into the present moment, anchors everyday happenings into our "core memory," and allows us to run with our heart instead of our mind (logic). Let me list times when it's hard to have fun:
- When you're in a rush.
- When you're not living in the present. E.g. thinking about work deadlines
- When you're stressed about race times, distances, and competition.
- When you're comparing yourself to others.

Fun is an interesting metric to optimise for. If there were to be a "fun metric" on Strava, it would have to be a sliding scale, similar to how we rank RPE (Rate of Perceived Effort). I imagine it to be a simple slider aptly titled "Amount of fun".

"0" is the least fun you've ever had, and 10 is the most fun you've ever had running. Simple things done well often leave the greatest impact on us; think of the best margarita pizza you've ever had. Or perhaps, when a cafe serves up a delicious long black. Simple wins; fun wins. In an alternate reductionist reality, I believe all Strava metrics could be boiled down to the short question: "Did you have fun or not?"

Imagine you're scrolling through your feed, and rather than looking for times and distances, you're trawling to see which of your friends had the most fun. Searching for fun would be a powerful reframe as I believe it would start to dissolve the comparison vortex we quickly get pulled into when scrolling from run to run. Changing how we frame a "successful run" from times and distance to fun would encourage us to run more sustainably. Fun doesn't ask us to run for time or in a specific heart rate zone. Fun asks how many times we smiled. Fun is curious about the new maps we unlock as our curiosity guides us into new parts of the world. Fun celebrates falling on downhills and reminds us that we're human. Life is slippery, and so is having fun. Although sweet in thought, fun is serious business. Fun is the ultimate mix of play, presence, love, joy, and strength. Just as we must build our fitness to run fast and far, we must also develop our "fun fitness". The more practice you have making your training playful, the more often you'll find yourself in fun situations. Similarly, if you do your strength work and remove distractions (e.g., your phone/headphones), you'll have more opportunities and space to have fun.

Instead of training for a race, why don't you reframe your next goal around having fun? Try it for three days, three weeks, and then three months. See if it changes your life or at least your running practice. Having fun can be your superpower; it's hard to beat someone who is having more fun than you. They'll go all day and even feel less pain!

So, to answer the question I asked you above, here are my top 5 runs when I had the most fun!

1.) In Switzerland, with my best friend Jackson, we ran down from the top of a mountain after sunset, fell into a flow state, and even got chased by a pack of goats halfway down.

2.) Running overnight with my Portuguese friends, completing a marathon, and having Pastel de Nata (Portuguese tarts) at the end.

3.) In a downhill segment of a trail race, fighting for first position, going back and forth in the lead and thinking, "We are flying right now!"

4.) Running with my girlfriend in NZ on our first international trail run together.

5.) Wednesday evening run club: I take my community around the neighbourhood and stop at a billboard to graffiti it with little running love notes.

As it stands, these runs didn't look like much on Strava. However, if there was a metric for fun, I'm sure the algorithm would have sent them your way.

I'll leave you with two tasks: - Send this to someone at Strava - Tell them we need a metric for fun. For your next run, score it out of 10 for how much fun you had.

I'll see you out there,

Big Love, JL