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The old cliché, of course, is that to seriously outperform something one runs circles around it. But for a certain Englishman in Tokyo it isn’t a matter of wanting to outperform an entire city so much as it is a desire to express his deep affection for his adopted home. So he isn’t running circles around Tokyo, he’s drawing pictures with it. Since November of 2010, English transplant Joseph Tame has periodically combined his love of running with that of Tokyoto turn the city into a rather large Etch-A-Sketch. Using a GPS device and special tracking software, Tame runs routes through Tokyo that end up forming large, whimsical pictures which are plotted and traced onto a Google map of the city. In April, he ran a 50 kilometer route which formed a large heart in central Tokyo. Earlier this month, he created a “G+” icon to celebrate the launch of the Google+ social networking service. And earlier this year, he ran 45 kilometers to form an ersatz Hello Kitty face spread over the Nakano and Shinjuku wards of western Tokyo. And as you’ll see at the link, he has drawn a few other fun figures as well. We can’t wait to see where this runner’s kinetic creativity will take him next. (The Art of Running – Huge Tokyo Heart)
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