For at least a year or two I’ve been waiting for someone to build a web service I could use to map running routes. This morning I drove to my buddy’s house at 6 and we went on a long run around Beverly Hills. With less than three weeks until the LA Marathon, it’s time to get serious about hitting the pavement. It took us about an hour and ten minutes, but — once again — I had no reliable way to determine the distance other than driving the route and watching my odometer. This is simply not practical in Los Angeles; at 7:30 in the morning there is so much traffic it would have taken me another hour of driving to do that. When I got to the office I figured I’d try searching for a Google Maps mashup. With the Nike iPod for runners and all the other cool mashups I’ve seen for everything else lately, I figured there must be one for running by now.
And there are two! At USATF (USA Track & Field) some brilliant souls have built a perfect route-mapping tool. We ran 6.72 mi (10.81km) this morning. How awesome! And now I can map the other five or six routes we take all the time to see how far I’ve really been going. Awesome. (There’s also one by Nike, but it’s not as cool.)
Responses to “Map Your Run”
Comments Closed
New comments are disabled on this post.
I have been using mapmyrun.com. It has a few more features than the USATF site, but is no where near as snappy.
Do you listen to music when you run ? If you do you should check out the PodRunner tracks from iTunes. They are constant BPM mixes designed to help you keep up the pace.
Also, on Google Earth, click tools and then ruler, and then click the tab “path”. And on the big, wide, virtua,l honking map, you can plot your running route to the nth degree, even if you’re a chronic corner cutter.