Meet @WallyGPX, the bicycling digital mapmaker

Sitting at the bar at Canton’s Of Love & Regret on a Wednesday afternoon, Michael Wallace is relaxing, perusing the beer list and talking about his day.

Pretty normal for anyone unwinding. You’d never know he biked nearly 30 miles, patched four flat tires and nearly ran over a dead squirrel a few hours ago except for the fact that he’s gulping down glasses of water in between sentences.
“I’ve been doing this as a way of tricking myself into exercise,” said Wallace, 44, who prefers to go by Wally or WallyGPX, his Instagram handle.
Bike routes stored in fitness apps are more than exercise trails for Wally. They’re art. The lines and curves made by his bike around Baltimore are pictures waiting to be revealed. His designs range from sharks that stretch across Canton — his neighborhood — and Fells Point to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump debating from Patterson Park to Highlandtown.
“The first thing I ever did was spell my name and when it worked, I started making everything,” said Wally of his first design eight years ago. He said the pictures have only gotten more complicated as he tries to be more creative.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BG-yul-FC-U/
“What I do is I plot out very elaborate, many of them very complicated, bicycle rides around the city of Baltimore, and other places too,” he said. “Then after I plot it all out, I look at Google Maps and try to find out if the pathway exists.”
A lot of this design work happens during the winter months when he’s too busy to ride. Wally is a science teacher at the Gilman School.
“After I construct the elaborate routes,” he said, “I get on my bicycle and hit record on three different platforms: MapMyRide, Strava, which is my favorite now, and MyTracks.”
Rides can last from a few miles to a few hours, with Wally usually trying to make two designs per day in the summer months. The day we met, he worked on maps of a virtual shadow and a badminton player.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BHAd6MElCxW/
Rides 390 and 391 got him closer to his 400-ride goal but it wasn’t easy.
“Today I saw a dead squirrel and today was a busted glass day. I got the first flat tire of my day and I walked it for a mile and a half and I got close to home,” he said.
Then, when he was close enough to home, he hid his phone in “a sketchy bush” and went to his house to get a drink of water and the necessary materials to patch the tire.
Wally said he knows leaving his phone in a bush can be seen as weird, even irresponsible, but it’s necessary for the mapmaking process.
“I’ve done it before and you hope no one is looking at you when you do it,” he said. “But I had to keep it live, which is what I call when I have a live recording going.”
The apps can be glitchy when he does it, but, “it’s part of the document when you’re said and done,” he said.
Once he retrieved his phone and his bike was back in shape, the ride again took a turn for the worse when Wally got three more flat tires.
“It was so miserable and two of the four flat tires were in Harbor East,” he said. “And it was really busy, people were walking around me asking how I was doing.”
Empty tires can be annoying but there have been worse rides.
“I made this ride called Star Wars Pez and I was dehydrated while making Yoda’s ear and I had to lay in the shade near a tree and I thought I should quit this for the sake of health and go home but I hydrated and waited,” he said, adding that there were also a couple of flat tires that day, too.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BG4wsJulCxT/
Usually, people are happy to see Wally on his rides and sometimes other cyclists try to keep up with him but there are the occasional bad apples that he bumps into.
“When I was making the Starship Enterprise, I was coming up a hill and a white van came up on me and was so close to me and the driver started shouting at me,” Wally said. “When we got up to the top of the hill, we both stopped and I shouted at the van and the window rolls down and it was three dudes that were all inked up and they looked mean. And then the light turned green and it was scary for a moment.”
But not everything unexpected is bad during his rides.
“There’s a lot of Baltimore that’s not so pleasant, but there’s also a lot of neat stuff out there,” he said of his adopted city. He’s originally from upstate New York but has spent the past decade in Baltimore.
“I was zooming down an alley last week and a little kid was playing soccer in a small backyard. He’d set up a net and I was going by slowly and the kid hits a shot and and it hits his house, and then comes back and smashed it in the corner of the net, and then hit a garbage can and knocked it over and I was like, ‘Nice shot, kid!’”
His bike has taken him places further than the streets of Baltimore. A few years ago, he flew to California and shot a commercial for Best Buy. It never made the air and Wally has only recently been able to discuss it because of the expiring gag order. He said it was a great experience and received a free bike he nicknamed Workhouse 2. It’s one of four bikes he has in rotation.
He spends the academic year at Gilman but has also flown to schools around the country and Canada for presentations and demonstrations on his craft. He usually rides solo but during a visit to an all-girls school in Raleigh, N.C., his one-man show swelled to 20 teenage girls.
“I was terrified because before the ride started some of them said they had never ridden on the streets before,” Wally said. “I was the king duckling and I had all of these ducks behind me. We made a very primitive dinosaur [through the bike route] but it all worked out, no one got hurt, everyone was happy.”
Wally said showing others the cool things that can come out of simply riding a bike is what pushes him to keep creating maps and riding.
“The best thing that’s come out of this is all the smiles that I hear about from people gawking at my stuff,” he said. “That’s the funnest thing, to know that other people have enjoyed these and have inspired other people to try different things on their bikes and with their smartphones.”
And he’s still enjoying it. Even after putting in almost 30 rides this summer and 391 overall, he doesn’t let a few flat tires and more than a few dead squirrels and rats keep him off the streets.
“I don’t want to look at a bike for five years at this exact moment,” he said, “but tomorrow will come around and I’ll be ready to rock.”