I mentioned here, that I started running this summer. I am following a training schedule to help me reach my goal but it keeps changing the distance that I must run each day. Instead of guestimating (surely it’s been a mile by now) or driving the route with the car (like I really feel like loading the kids another time) to try to calculate the distance, my wonderful husband, the engineer, found me an online application made using google maps that is a HUGE help! I simply go to google pedometer and type in the starting address and trace out on the map the path I want to run and it calculates the distance for me (along with calories burned).
I do all my running on roads but if you wanted to you can switch to satellite view and trace out your path through the woods or city park. My husband told me it could even overlay a topographical map but that was beyond my interest level. Today, I had to run 3 miles to stick with my schedule, and I was able to type in my address and plan a route that took me that exact distance (padded with some intentional cool down time at the end). It worked perfectly (though next time I will check the topography to avoid the hill)! The picture below is the graph it generated telling me the elevation change.
Pretty cool.
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Great tip! I would use that – except we just moved to a town is almost enitrely flat. It only has one hill and they named it! Thanks anyway!
Every woman should have a personal engineer consultant!
Another good one is mapmyrun.com…it can even tell you your pace time!
How cool! I just love Google maps, so useful.
What a great idea!! Thanks so much for posting about it.
Cool! I had no idea it could do that! Now I just have to convince myself to run.
wow, that’s quite a hill. who knew your neighborhood was so…. rugged? i’m also a fan of mapmyrun.com. my neighborhood is flat, too. i’m the annapolis 10 mile will hurt!