It was a tough pill to swallow for Thijs de Buck, a Dutch physicist and marathon runner, when he realized his hamster, Mollie, runs both further and more frequently than he does. These hilarious results stem from an experiment where De Buck synced Mollie’s running wheel to Strava, allowing him to track all of his pet’s training sessions.
Mollie logs an average of around 70 kilometers per week, with her longest single-evening session reaching 11.15 kilometers. She hits the wheel every single day – or rather, night. Beyond keeping the hamster in peak shape, the setup has made her a social media hit: while De Buck usually receives just a handful of kudos per workout, Mollie routinely racks up over a thousand.
The experiment was born out of simple curiosity; De Buck wondered just how far his ten-month-old hamster actually ran at night. He initially attached a cheap bike computer to the wheel, but the device shut down whenever Mollie took a break longer than five minutes. To fix this, De Buck custom-built a more precise system using a magnet and sensor on the wheel to register every rotation, automatically uploading the activity to Strava each morning. Getting the automated upload feature to work required a paid subscription. “So there was only one solution: my hamster now has Strava Premium,” De Buck told Runner’s World.
Although the hamster – who now even has a live display screen next to her wheel – easily outperforms her owner in training volume and kudos, De Buck still holds the advantage in speed: Mollie tops out at around five kilometers per hour.
