What Strava Tells Us
I went on a bit of Strava spelunking the other night. There has been some more chatter about Strava on Twitter as it relates to Nikki in recent days, and I thought I would dig into it more (again). I've been a religious Strava user since 2007, somehow, and being a competitive runner/ultrarunner, have nerded out with my fair share of Strava features, third-party apps and plugins over the years.
Quick refresher: Strava is an activity-tracking app that's incredibly community- and data-driven in nature. It is the biggest app in its category, with more than one hundred million users around the world. It has a paid subscription option for those who love data, mapping and saving their routes, and the more competitive features they offer. In addition to logging any manner of exercise, whether out in nature, at the gym, or via a streaming class service like Apple Fitness or Peloton, there are some really fun elements. Users can add and compete on "segments" anywhere in the world. A segment is basically a stretch of road or trail of any length. When you walk, hike, run or ride (or ski, etc.) across that segment, Strava will register your time on the segment, and you can compete against others over time and become part of the leaderboard for that segment. This is important because a lot of people make their workouts public so their segment efforts can be recorded on the public segment leaderboards. Even if your account is private, if you made the activities public at the time for the purposes of segment performances, your best performances for those segments will still show up in the segment leaderboard, and the details of the associated workout you did covering that segment will also be public.
Nikki's Walks and Runs
Nikki's account has been made private (she's still a paid subscriber, as indicated by the orange flag next to her name below, which is totally bizarre; that ish ain't cheap), so there's not that much that we can see. I don't want to get anyone's hopes up. But she did run and walk across some segments, and therefore her best performances for those segments are still public. I didn't glean much, and seeing these actually made me really depressed. My biggest takeaway is that from start to finish (including time in the car when she'd be inadvertently still recording on Strava), she took about 50-60 minutes to complete her walk. That includes starts and stops within the walks. The time she was actually moving was more like 20 to 30 minutes. Strava has a "moving time" and "elapsed time" to differentiate between the two. In the two cases, the elapsed time was around 50 minutes and 61 minutes. Both are from October of 2022:
In the case of these two walks (one for her best time in a towpath segment called "East," the other for the segment called "West"), she kept recording on Strava for part of her drive home. So I'd tack on another 5-10 minutes for the rest of the drive home. In both cases I'd estimate she would be out of the house from about 8:25/8:30am to 9:50am or 9:55am. That tracks with statements from her partner and family, and with other Strava walks that were screenshotted and shared by media and on social media at the beginning of the search for her, before the account was made private in the name of "telephony." I'd guess she might take longer if she was engaging with a work call that lasted until 10am, if such a thing ever happened. Then you'd get the "quarter past ten at a push" that her partner estimated in the Channel 5 interview.
Segments on Strava are categorized by type of exercise, so there are separate segments for cyclists, walkers, runners, et al. One of Nikki's runs, her best performance on a run segment called "The Defence 8," also still shows up publicly. It is from 2020, deep in pandemic land:
It is important to note that on Strava, you cannot see the time of the day these activities started or stopped. (There are ways to see this by downloading the original files and analyzing them with third-party tools; I may do this.) When her account was still public, you could see the times she started her walks/runs for the ones that were public. Now you can't. But we can assume these began after the school drop-off based on where she parked in all three cases (on Hall Lane by the school/tennis club). My only question about this run is that I don't remember seeing it when I first looked at her account in February when it was still public. I swore I went back to 2020 when I first looked, but in any case...
It is also important to note that the spike where it appears she goes into the pond/lake at Rowanwater is not accurate. It probably comes from her pausing and restarting her run and the GPS glitching when she did this. It happens all the time, especially when you pause and restart runs/walks/bike rides, and especially when you're near water.
If you want to see a summary of her walks that were public before the account was hidden, here's a TikTok that covers a lot of them.
Moving on, since this is all we've got for her account (but I am wondering why she's still a subscriber...it costs £8.99 per month).
Other Walks During the Time Nikki Was Missing
Looking at these same segments and other walk and run segments in the area, a lot showed up for the late January to mid-February time period. There was a five-hour walk that a friend of Nikki's did looking for her, in which it's clear that they basically did a grid search covering the riverside, the upper and lower fields, the fields on the other side of Garstang Rd/Blackpool Lane, and the "Huws" area that Penny walked the morning of the 27th. So kudos to them. I am not going to be linking to that one. While I love you all, I worry that some people might use the amount of publicly available info on Strava in nefarious ways. But it was very early on in the search, and here is a screenshot:
And there are walks from members of the public. Quite a few of them. Here's just one, from February 5. This person walked the length of the river almost as far as the location where Nikki was eventually found (her eventual location marked by the purple circle):
My biggest takeaway after the Strava deep-dive is simply a reminder to myself and everyone else: Volunteers spent a long time looking for Nikki along the river and adjacent areas and didn't find her. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, that's in addition to police sniffer dogs, expert volunteer SAR (search and rescue) teams (and their dogs), Faulding and team, helicopters, divers, and pole camera operators. Based on the extremely low river levels, the tidal activity, the lack of heavy rain or flooding, and simply the number of eyes on that river from January 27 to February 19, I just don't believe it's possible that she was in the river for the majority of that time.
With that, I will leave you with Irish Eyes' excellent video from a few weeks ago (also below, but has to be watched on YouTube apparently). I only recently watched it, and was so impressed with how she analyzed the police diver's video evidence, Faulding statements and much more to conclude the same thing as me (and so many of us): Nikki just wasn't in there–probably not until February 15 or thereabouts, in my opinion. (Sidenote: I talked with my mother about this case for the first time yesterday and after hearing everything, she said, She was probably moved around the time of the Channel 5 interview. !! Make of that what you will! My mother's comments are for entertainment purposes only! 😛)