Running Around in Circles (Literally) With the KYRO App

Sunday, 16 August. A warm-up at Shiro, a running app most of us had installed the night before without really knowing what it did, and a park about to be carved up.

By the time we walked back in from Cubbon Park, I had drawn more closed circuits on a map in one morning than in the rest of my life put together.

KYRO is a running app out of South Korea that turns the map into a board game. Run a closed loop and everything inside it becomes your territory. Want someone else's territory? Go cover the same ground, close a loop over theirs, and it flips to you.

The scoring is what makes it worth strategising over. The leaderboard rewards two things at once: how much ground you took, and how long you managed to hold it. Grabbing a huge area feels great for about four minutes, until someone laps you and takes it.

We also met Jeongwoo Ahn, who built it. He wrote the entire app himself, it is already popular across Korea, and he is currently on a KYRO India tour, going city by city and setting up these group battles so people try the app together instead of alone.

Shaking hands with the solo developer of the app you are about to spend a whole morning inside is not a normal Sunday.

The only homework was installing KYRO before arriving. At Shiro we did a warm-up and an icebreaker round, then got split into teams of roughly eleven or twelve.

Runaway, East India Company, Fast Lions, and a few more. I landed on Runaway, led by Sanches.

Then came the part nobody expects at a run club: planning. We stood around talking about Cubbon Park the way you would talk about a map in a strategy game. Sanches is the fastest runner in our group, so we handed her the biggest loop, the one that needed real pace to close before anyone could contest it. The rest of us carved up the park so that no two of us were fighting over the same patch of ground.

Then we went and ran, and the plan met reality.

Almost nobody in the group had opened the app before that morning, so the first stretch was mostly people squinting at their phones, asking each other whether a loop had registered and whether they had somehow ruined it. Going in, plenty of us were less worried about winning than about using the thing correctly.

That lasted exactly one lap. Once the first circuit recorded and the territory shaded in on the map, it clicked for everybody more or less at the same time. From then on you could watch the leaderboard move live. Someone would take the top spot, and a couple of minutes later someone else would cut straight over them and take it back. Getting dethroned by a person you had been stretching next to an hour earlier is a specific kind of funny.

I logged everything I had planned. So did the rest of Runaway.

We finished fifth.

East India Company won.

One day after Independence Day. Nobody planned that, pretty funny, isn't it?

Team standings were not the only thing being counted. Once everybody was back at Shiro, the top individual performer in the men's category and the top individual performer in the women's category were both called up and felicitated, and Jeongwoo handed over the prizes.

Back at Shiro we finished with a cool-down, a dance session that outlasted the cool-down, and an Asian breakfast spread I would happily have earned twice over.

What stayed with me was how well the two halves fit. I work on the tech side of Stride, so a morning where the software and the workout were the same activity was not something I expected to enjoy this much. Nobody was carrying an app around the park. We were playing it with our legs.

KYRO is free on iOS and Android. Trace one circuit of your own neighbourhood and watch the shape shade in. Most people are hooked before they finish the second one.

Stride's next collab in this direction gets announced on our Instagram first, and slots go live on the Stride events page. The good ones close quickly.