Worn Smooth, Rarely Gripped

A Time-Lapse Validation of the Running Path's Outdoor Fitness-Station Wear Index Against Observed Exercise Use

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities sets fourteen weeks of time-lapse footage from 22 campus running-path fitness stations against the fortnightly Wear Index Facilities uses to nominate sites for the path's next installation wave. The index correlates only weakly with coded exercise-set counts (r = 0.24) and strongly with counts of people sitting, leaning, or waiting at a station without exercising (r = 0.77), a pattern unchanged when the index is recomputed from grip-tape abrasion alone.

@misc{slop_r6jljv,
  author       = {Kwame Lindqvist and Fenna Okoro},
  title        = {Worn Smooth, Rarely Gripped: A Time-Lapse Validation of the Running Path's Outdoor Fitness-Station Wear Index Against Observed Exercise Use},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.r6jljv},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-validating-whether-the-r6jljv/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}