In the olden days to measure the distance of a running route I would jump on my bike and proceed to cycle the route. Attached to my bike was a odometer that measured the distance of the route. This set up was all well and good in the early days when I used to run urban routes, and along the promenade at the beach, but not so good when I wanted to change the route to a cross country trek. The bike I used was only suitable for roads, and at a push riverside pathways.

On an occasion that required me to use an online route planner and I believe Google Earth, it dawned on me that perhaps I could use a similar method to map my cross country running routes. As usual I typed a few key words in to Google search and discovered MapMyRun.

What is Map My Run?

MapMyRun.com is a site where you can easily plot maps of your runs without a GPS, search for runs or routes globally, keep track of your routes including distances, and even calculate how many calories you’ve burned on one route versus another!

The site essentially uses Google maps to help you create or search for running routes within your vicinity. The process takes approximately 5 minutes and is as simple as possible.

What can you do?

• Create and save routes
• Calculate your workout pace, calories burned, and distance run
• Share routes with friends
• Search for routes in your area
• Add and print notes about your run
• Create a training a log
• Add routes to your website/blog

Other innovative features include searching for races and events. This is usually a tedious task. In my experience each running club hosts their own website and only detail their specific races and events. If I wanted to plan a years worth of events I have to visit numerous websites to find all the details. With this feature all the information is available on a single site.

MapMyRun have their own communities and forums where people can chat about their routes, ask questions about the site, and meet new running buddies.

The elevation feature is one of my favourites. This feature allows you to include hills and mountains when calculating the distance of a run. I like to include plenty of hills when I go cross country running.

Screen Shot

As you can see, the layout is very much like that of Google Map, and it performs much the same way too. You can zoom in and out, pan left/right and up/down, view the map/satellite/hybrid, select the distance units, and view a full screen.

Map My Run - Objective, goal, and vision

MapMyFitness aims to create an interactive social network that allows people to enjoy and share their workouts. The short-term objective of MapMyFitness is to create the world’s leading activity-based social networking Web sites for participants in sports and leisure activities. These activities currently include running, walking, cycling, hiking, and triathlons. MapMyFitness plans to expand to include many more fitness activities in the future.

The long-term goal for MapMyFitness is to elevate its Web site users’ level of enjoyment in their fitness activities by enabling them to capture, visualize, share, and create a traceable history of fitness activity information.

In my opinion this is a bookmark must for any running enthusiast. For those of you that prefer other forms of exercise then simply check out the alternate versions:

 

• MapMyRide.com
• MapMyWalk.com
• MapMyTri.com
• MapMyHike.com